


One Shot Kill

by shadowen



Series: Line of Sight [7]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Established Relationship, M/M, Romance, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-30
Updated: 2014-01-03
Packaged: 2018-01-06 16:44:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1109160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowen/pseuds/shadowen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's never that simple.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Warning for graphic depictions of violence.** Like, much graphic, so violence, wow. The first chapter is the worst and contains **forced self-harm** , and there's fighting and shooting and **graphic description of injuries** throughout. Fair warning.
> 
> Many thanks to coffeesuperhero and leiascully for making sure the story made sense and the metaphors weren't dumb.

Clint had a plan. The plan in question had been dramatically derailed by a poorly-timed phone call, but there _had_ been one. He’d spent weeks talking himself into and out of it and another month working out the when, where, and how of it. What he’d settled on more closely resembled an emotional ambush than a proposal, but he stood by it.

He even had a ring.

The ring, of course, was still in its box under the nightstand, and nowhere in the plan had there been anything about getting called away to rescue a recon team in Colombia. But, Clint figured, that was life with SHIELD.

“Y’know, when I said I wanted to do something for our anniversary, this isn’t really what I meant.”

Behind him in the dark sewer tunnel, Phil snorted. “What? Reliving a hellish week of near-death isn’t romantic enough?”

The primary objective of Operation Evangeline was to extract priority political refugees out of the country and into UN custody. Objective number two was to gather intelligence and report back on just how much of a clusterfuck the Colombian government was in. As of Sitwell’s last check-in, the refugees were secure, the intel was solid, and departure was pending.

That was the _last_ check-in.

“Couldn’t we relive it somewhere nice? Like Hawai’i?”

“Morse is in Kaho’olawe busting a kidnapping ring.”

Clint looked back over his shoulder. “You’re kidding.” Phil shook his head, a blur of motion in harsh nightvision, and Clint muttered, “No vacation spots left, I swear.”

“Costa Rica’s nice this time of year,” Phil said. “And smuggler-free, as of last Tuesday.”

“You take me to the nicest places.”

After forty-eight hours of unscheduled silence, an emergency communication with Romanov’s authentication had come through on a short-range channel. The message had contained exactly one word: _Help_.

Clint and Phil were on the ground in Colombia inside of twelve hours.

“Our anniversary’s not until November, anyway,” Phil pointed out. He tapped Clint’s shoulder, and they paused at the intersection of a smaller tunnel.

“What are we counting from?”

Phil tilted his head.

“Oh. _Oh_. Right. Yeah, that’s a much better memory.”

“I should hope so,” Phil said dryly. “Though I think last night may have been one for the books, as well.”

Clint absolutely did not run his fingers over the tender bite mark on his throat, no matter how badly he wanted to. Instead, he hid his swallow behind a smirk and said, “Yeah, I notice you’re still walking a little funny.”

Phil just glanced up at him, a half second of eye contact through the filtered glasses, and Clint decided that the second they made it home, he was getting that ring.

First things first, though.

Seven agents had been assigned to Operation Evangeline. They had found Natasha and two others, all three of them injured, secured at the safe house in the city, along with half a dozen civilians. The remaining four.... Well, the remaining four agents were the reason Clint and Phil were currently making their way through the sewer access tunnels beneath the city center.

"Left, thirty meters," Phil said. "There should be an access ladder."

Clint obediently started down the narrow tunnel to the left, counting out the steps in his head. There was no dry ground here, and his boots sloshed in the thick, rank sewage.

"Yuck. You're gonna make Sitwell pay for our dry cleaning, right?"

The tunnel ceiling slanted lower as they went on, as though the weight of something unseen was pressing down on them.

"You don't have any dry cleaning," Phil said. "All your gear gets cleaned on base, and you don’t own anything else but jeans and t-shirts."

“Hey, I have a suit,” Clint protested.

“You have a sport coat.”

“That doesn’t count?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Clint came to a stop in front of a flimsy access ladder bolted into the tunnel wall. “Maybe I should go shopping.” Phil shot him a dubious look. “What? I gotta clean up if you’re gonna be pals with Tony Stark. You won’t wanna be dragging around your trailer trash boyfriend.”

“You....” Phil shook his head. “There is so much wrong with that statement, I don’t know where to start.”

Clint tested his weight on the ladder and started carefully upward. “Start with the part where you spent a month in Malibu without me.”

“I was working,” Phil said, climbing up behind him.

“Malibu. California. With Iron Man and movie stars.”

Phil sighed. “Are you ever going to let that go?”

“Probably not.” 

Clint pushed up the manhole cover so that a sliver of light from the street above cut across his face. He turned slowly, checking all directions, and caught sight of two pairs of boots walking past. He signed back down to Phil, who gave him two taps to go when the coast was clear.

The scrape of metal on concrete was a whisper against the ambient sounds of a city at night as Clint slid the cover away and hauled himself up into the street. Clint himself was a shadow, all matte black and quick steps as he darted for the cover of a dark corner. He melted into the shallow blackness and waited.

Phil was, if anything, even more swift and silent as he slipped out of the ground and into the shadows next to Clint, but Phil was the ninja that other ninjas were afraid of. The steady press of his shoulder against Clint’s was like a compass point, still and constant as the world spun around them. Phil motioned forward, and Clint nodded, creeping along a low brick wall toward one in a series of nondescript government villas. 

Natasha had been able to give them minimal intel on the facility. It was state offices, currently inhabited by a private security company in bed with a few high-level officials. Location security was tight but fairly standard, and they had a fix on where Sitwell, at least, was being held, traced to his active comm device. With a lot of stealth and a little bit of luck, they’d have Sitwell and his three agents back at the safehouse inside the hour, and the whole lot of them would be airborne and out of there by morning.

The plan was simple, predictable, and still Clint couldn’t shake a sense of unease that made the hairs on his neck stand straight up.

They crept along until the wall they were following intersected with another, this one built high out of smooth concrete. Phil motioned for Clint to wait, then gave himself a few paces for a running start, propelling himself up and over. He paused for half a second on top of the higher wall, his shoulders in slight silhouette on the backdrop of paler shadows, and then he was gone, quick and quiet as night falling. 

Clint held his breath, waiting, marking the moments in his head. He wasn’t thinking about the possibility that he might hear gunfire at any moment, and he _certainly_ wasn’t thinking how fucking typical it would be for shit to hit the fan while there was a wall between them.

The comm in his ear gave two soft clicks. “ _All clear,_ ” Phil said. “ _Watch for the glass._ ”

Clint breathed out slowly. “Copy. Heads-up.”

He did his own run up to the wall, careful not to put his hands flat on the jagged points of broken glass sticking up from the concrete on top, and dropped smoothly to the ground, landing in a crouch next to Phil. 

The courtyard inside the wall was richly landscaped with lush tropical plants, and the foliage cast a riot of thick, inky shadows through which the two of them moved. The sweet smell of orchids hung heavy in the air, like a glaze over the city smells of sweating bodies and exhaust fumes. Slivers of light in the windows sliced around the edges of thick curtains and fell across the lawn in lengthened shards, sharp enough to cut any shadows that drew too near the building.

Two men stood sentry at the front door, and Clint guessed there would be a third making rounds. Not a lot of muscle for a place holding four SHIELD agents.

“Don’t like this,” Clint muttered softly, barely a sound. “Doesn’t feel right.”

Phil’s answer was no more than a short nod, but Clint could see his face, ghostly in the relentless pallor of night vision, and the hard line of his jaw. Phil motioned sharply, and Clint dashed the short distance to the side of the building, pressing back against the plaster wall and checking his sight lines. Phil followed him a heartbeat later, and they began the slow, cautious game of leapfrogging to what they hoped would be the building’s unguarded back face.

Clint stopped at the corner and peered around. One guard, having a smoke, like the world’s worst action movie cliché. The guy never stood a chance, and he made no noise but a sharp, wet grunt as Clint’s forearm locked around his throat. 

Four seconds, and the racing pulse began to slow.

Five, and the breaths puffing against Clint’s palm weakened down to nothing.

Six seconds, and the tense muscles melted into dead weight.

Seven for good measure.

The man’s hair, pressed against Clint’s face, smelled of sweat and oily styling gel, thick and cloying. Clint hauled the guard's limp form into the dense shelter of a flowering tree and darted back to join Phil beneath the shadow of a darkened balcony. Clint unfolded his bow with a soft click and knelt as he drew an arrow, aiming straight up toward the starless sky. 

No wind, distance under thirty feet, smooth contact surface. He adjusted his draw by a hair and his angle by the barest whisper of a degree. 

He breathed in. Orchids and exhaust and the strange layering of Kevlar, Lycra, and skin from Phil at his side. He breathed out and loosed, easy as a smile.

The arrow shot up, trailing a black cord that was barely visible in the dark. It impacted just below the eave, and the grappling head unfurled to bury its claws in the plaster and tile. Clint gave the line a tug to test and passed it to Phil, who scaled up three stories like a spider invading a foreign web.

There was a disconnect, Clint had noticed, in the way other agents looked at Phil, and the line was drawn very clearly along the difference between those who had seen him in the field and those who hadn’t. Clint didn’t really get it; he’d known Phil was a badass the second he saw him, tailored suit and all. Lucky for him most people didn’t see so well.

He followed Phil up to the balcony and retrieved the arrow. If everything went to plan, it would provide their escape route as well, though Clint wasn’t having the best luck with plans, at the moment. Alternative escape options included explosive arrows, flash grenades, and an industrial-strength smoke bomb, all of which Clint sincerely hoped he wouldn’t need.

They came in through an empty, unremarkable office and emerged onto the third floor. The glow of light and muted voices filtered up through the stairwell, but the floor was otherwise still. Phil checked the tracker, the little blinking light still showing that Sitwell, or at least his comm, was in a room just around the corner. Phil glanced up and met Clint’s eye with a grim look.

Long time in one place, light security, no other signals. It was long odds that they were rescuing anything other than a ghost, but they had to try.

For his birthday, Clint had gotten a birthday card, emblazoned with a glittery cartoon penis, that had played “Let’s Get it On” when opened. Inside, was a hand-written message that said, “If you knew how many tacky sex shops I had to visit to find this card, you’d appreciate it. Happy Birthday. Jasper.”

For that, if nothing else, Clint had to try.

There was one guard outside the door, and Phil had him on the ground before he could blink. A strip of light came through the gap beneath, and a heavy, rotting smell filtered out into the hallway. Clint reached for the doorknob, simple false brass with a bolt lock, and it turned easily in his hand. He shared a tense glance with Phil and stepped back, readying an arrow, as Phil drew his gun and took up a cautious position at the door.

All of Clint’s instincts were screaming for flight. All of this felt wrong.

Phil flashed three fingers, and Clint counted down in his head. He was already moving as Phil flung open the door, sighting along his arrow, scanning for threats.

Nothing. No guards, no cameras or alarms. There was nothing in the room but a patterned rug, a folding chair, and four agents of SHIELD.

Sitwell was in the chair, his back to the door, and Clint... didn’t want to see. Didn’t want to know. Because the other three agents were stretched out on the rug in front of him in a wide pool of dark, clotted blood. Bits of gore dotted the far wall and the floor below. Clint could see one face, a level four weapons tech whose name he didn’t know, her eyes blank and wide, brows slack below the jagged crack where part of her head had been blasted open.

Clint turned back to haul the fallen guard out of the hallway and shut the door. He tried to make himself breathe, forced a deep inhale, and choked on the thick smell of dead flesh and shit.

“Jasper?” Phil’s voice was quiet, calm, betraying nothing of the horror that Clint could hear squelching under his boots. Clint paced back until he was level with Phil, who was crouched beside the folding chair, carefully working the gag out of Sitwell’s mouth.

“No. Jesus. Fuck. Shit. What the fuck are you doing here?” Sitwell demanded hoarsely. His lips were split and swollen, his face streaked with dried blood. They’d worked him over good, but there were no bruises around his cheeks and eyes. His glasses, perched carefully on top of the battered bridge of his nose, were spotless.

They’d wanted him to see. Whatever had been done to the others, they’d wanted him to see.

Clint tasted bile and swallowed hard.

“Saving you, and you’re welcome,” Phil said, slitting the bindings on Sitwell’s hands. “Can you walk?”

The moment his hands were free, though, Sitwell began to claw at his ear. “Fuck. Get it out. Jesus Christ. Get it. Get it _out_!”

“ _Jasper._ ” Phil caught hold of his wrist and jerked. “Look at me.”

Sitwell froze, breathed in, closed his eyes, and his exhale was hard and shaking. “It’s the comms,” he insisted, reaching around with his free hand. He dug the device out of his ear and threw it across the room. “He used the comms. He made me do it.”

Phil shook his head. “We don’t have time for this. Jasper, we have to go.”

From inside the building, a muffled shout rose, followed closely by the clatter of voices raised in alarm.

“Shit,” Clint muttered. “Sir, I think it’s time for that daring escape.”

Phil hauled Sitwell to his feet, but Sitwell pushed him off. “I can walk, dammit, but y-” His foot brushed against the ankle of the dead tech, and he doubled over in a dry heave. “He made me do it,” he rasped. “It’s the comms. We have to go.”

“That’s the idea.” Phil steadied Sitwell and looked to Clint. “Agent Barton, if you would.”

Clint nodded and went to the window. He threw back the drapes and shutters and swung open the glass panels, peering out onto the courtyard and the dark street beyond, scanning for... There.

He nocked the grappling arrow and drew back his bow in a smooth motion. He loosed without a thought, without any guidance but the instinct of the thousand shots before it. The arrow arced through the night and struck home on a far roof just as heavy boots sounded on the stairs.

Clint secured the line and hooked on a grip handle. “Ready.”

Phil gave Sitwell a shove. “The others are at safehouse one. Go.”

Despite his well-earned panic, Sitwell had the good sense not to argue. He steadied himself with a hand on Clint’s shoulder as he climbed to the window sill, took hold of the zip line, and slipped out into the night.

The raised voices and heavy boots had reached the hall outside.

Clint had an explosive arrow drawn and aimed at the door. “Your turn, sir.”

Phil backed across the room toward him, gun trained on the door. “As soon as I’m clear, blow the door and follow,” he ordered.

“Trust me, sir. I’ll be right b-”

The sound that cut through Clint’s head wasn’t a sound. It was razor wire strung in through his eardrums and sawing at the center of his brain. It was a needle driven in behind his eyes. His bow and arrow clattered to the floor as he collapsed, clutching his head.

_The comms. It’s the comms._ Clint clawed desperately at his ear. He felt the skin tear under his fingernails, but the pain was nothing to the splitting, shrieking agony of that sound. His fingertips touched the tiny comm device, and it resisted as he tried to dig it out, like the sound itself was binding it in place. 

The sound stopped, leaving only a sharp ringing and the noise of the world around him, now dull and dampened by whatever the fuck had just happened.

He could hear enough, though, to know the sound of Phil gasping on the floor beside him.

Clint tried to roll toward him, tried to fight or lash out, but his muscles wouldn’t work. He could do nothing but groan in pain and rage as an expensive shoe slid under his shoulder and kicked him roughly onto his back.

Clint found himself blinking up into the ruined face of William Cross, who stared back down at him with a twisted scowl that dripped poisonous disdain.

“Oh,” Cross snarled. “It’s you.”

***  
One of the great ironies of Phil’s life was that, for all his training and skill, he had never been a very good shot.

Clint never teased him for it, but Phil suspected that was less to do with kindness and more to do with the fact that Clint, with very few exceptions, looked at anyone else with a projectile weapon the way an architect looked at a child with Legos.

He remembered shooting Cross, remembered it as a single shot in a desperate frenzy of arrows and bullets, all overshadowed by sharper memories and bitter fear. The recollection came more clearly with the memory of Cross standing over him, a mechanical implant in place of the eye that Phil’s shot had taken.

Now, with every fiber of his being, Phil wished for better aim.

“He made Sitwell kill them,” Clint said quietly. “Whatever he did with the comms. I don’t know. He used it to make Sitwell kill the others.”

They had been tossed into a corner, stripped of their gear and handcuffed; the bodies of the three agents were still laid out on the blood-smeared rug. Phil’s hearing had taken on a filtered quality, processed and sharp, and Clint’s voice sounded as if it was coming to him from a clear recording.

He shook his head. “None of this makes sense. We should have known Cross was here, and we certainly should have known if he had that kind of tech.”

With the push of a button, Cross had banished the hold imposed on them by the ear-shattering sound. Phil suspected that the push of a button would likewise be enough to restore it, or to inflict whatever else the technology was designed for.

“You ever hear of anything like that?” Clint asked. He wasn’t looking at Phil, didn’t seem to be looking at anything, but Phil knew that his eyes were scanning the room for weak spots, surveillance, potential weapons, and any other details of use. He didn’t look at the bodies on the floor.

“Stark made a sonic device that induces short-term paralysis, and there were reports that Hydra had developed something similar,” Phil said, and he did let himself look at the corpses in front of him. “Not like this, though. Nothing like this.”

There was hardly a foot of space between them, little enough that Phil could feel the heat of Clint’s nearness on the bare skin above his collar, but there was no crossing that distance. They had to assume that they were being watched, somehow, and any hint of closeness would give too much away.

He wasn’t thinking about what Cross could do with that information, and he wasn’t thinking about the three battered bodies on the floor and whether a friendly hand had pulled the trigger.

The door flew open with a crash and Cross strode in, seething. His shoes tracked smears of blood on the rug as he stomped through the viscous red without concern.

“Okay, assholes, here’s where this gets interesting.” Cross stopped, crouching down in front of them, just far enough away to avoid a kick to the head. From the corner of his eye, Phil could see Clint considering it, anyway. “Let’s just cut the bullshit, alright? I don’t have time for it. I know who you are.”

Phil and Clint exchanged a look. “So?” Clint asked.

Cross rolled his eyes. Pointing at Clint, he said, “Clint Barton, combat expert, short-listed for the Avengers Initiative.” To Phil, “Phil Coulson, senior field agent, personal friend of Director Nick Fury. You’re gonna tell me what I need to know.” Back to Clint, he added, “ _You_ are gonna keep your mouth shut or I will cut out your tongue with a pair of kitchen scissors.”

Clint, predictably, opened his mouth to answer, but Phil cut him off. “Barton.”

Clint shot him a glare, but he stayed silent.

“Good. Smart.” Cross nodded. With the strange mechanical eye, he had the look of a half-finished robot performing motion tests. “So I know you’ve got people in the city. At least two other agents, plus four or five civilians, and your buddy Sitwell’s probably gotten there, by now. All I need to kn-”

“No.” Phil knew this game, and he wasn’t going to play.

Cross ran a hand over his face. “Look, I don’t even care about SHIELD. You wanna fuck around pretending to be the good guys, knock yourselves out. I just need to put a bullet in one stupid bitch who’s hiding out with your people. That’s it.”

“You know who we are,” Phil said, calm and even despite the icy seed of primal fear deep in his stomach. “So I expect you know how likely it is that either of us is going to give you anything.”

“Oh, I think it’s pretty damn likely, but I’m gonna give you three chances, just in case.” He drew a gun - Phil’s gun - out of his pocket, and chambered a round with a loud _clack_. “Where’s the safe house?”

Phil looked to Clint, who stared back with a tight jaw and hard eyes. “I think I speak for both Agent Barton and myself when I suggest that you go fuck yourself.”

Cross sighed. “Fine. That was one, and I want you to remember that I tried to be nice.” He pulled a device from another pocket and tapped a command.

The horrible piercing sound stabbed through the center of Phil’s head like a scalpel slicing out his eyes from the inside. He bit back a cry of pain, and forced himself to breathe as the sound pulsed and stopped, leaving him frozen in place, his muscles tensed and buzzing. He could turn his head just enough to see Clint, pale and paralyzed beside him, his chest heaving. Phil couldn’t stop himself from thinking that he should have moved closer while there was still a chance and wouldn’t let himself think about the bodies on the floor.

Cross entered another command, and Phil lurched clumsily to his knees. He tried to carry the movement forward, to roll to his feet and kick the gun from Cross’s hand, but the impulse stayed burning at the ends his nerves, unfulfilled.

There was a click, and the cuffs around Phil’s wrists disconnected, letting his arms fall to his sides. It was worse, somehow, having that bit of freedom and still being trapped inside his traitorous skin.

Standing, Cross held out the gun, and Phil watched his own hand rise slowly, watched his fingers curl around the grip. When Cross let go, Phil’s hand stayed suspended, his finger resting on the cold trigger guard.

“Normally, there’d be a run-up to this, but I’m a little pressed for time.”

Phil tried to fight, and his arm shook as it moved slowly, deliberately downward, until the barrel was pressed into the flesh above his knee. His heart pounded, and he sucked in deep, even breaths between his gritted teeth.

“Whoa. Okay. Hold on,” Clint protested. There was no panic in his voice, just a dark, sharp-edged intimation of dread.

“Unless you’ve got an answer for me, shut the hell up,” Cross snapped.

Phil’s grip went white-knuckled around the gun, and the barrel dug harder into his leg. “Barton, don’t.”

“Don’t what?” Clint spat. “Don’t point out that this is completely fucked up and not gonna work anyway? Because it is, and it’s not.”

Cross gave Clint a glare. “Kitchen scissors. Dull, rusty kitchen scissors, and I’ll make you cut it out yourself.”

“Fuck you. Why don’t you just knock us around like a normal person?”

“I don’t have time for this.” Cross made some small adjustment to the device in his hand, and Phil’s finger curled around the trigger. “Agent Coulson, where is the safe house?”

Phil looked up and met Cross’s eye with a cold, silent stare.

The shot was deafening. The sound and the bullet both hit Phil in a concussion of blank, white pain. He fell sideways onto the floor, his head just inches from Clint’s feet. There was blood spattered on his arm, his hand, his face, everywhere. He could taste it, thick and hot at the corner of his mouth.

Someone was shouting, close and unclear through the ringing in his ears. 

"... _fucker_! The fuck is wrong with you?"

Calmly, evenly, Cross said, "That was two."

Before Phil could even begin to breathe, Cross entered another command, and Phil was forced back to his knees. The scream that tore out of him, unbidden and awful, burned in his throat as his weight came down on the shattered mess that remained of his knee.

“I know where it is, too, y’know,” Clint said, and the seed of fear in Phil’s stomach blossomed into an evil, thorny thing, winding its wicked ends around the sickening pain.

“Yes, but I don’t want to waste my time with you.” Cross pressed a toe into the ruin of Phil’s knee, and any intervention Phil might have made vanished behind a desperate sound as his vision swam and greyed. “Some of the guys around here might have some fun with you, though, if your partner doesn’t help me out.”

Phil fought to keep his weight balanced, fought to keep himself present and aware, but all of his senses were flooded with agony and the certainty that he was going to die in the next few minutes. He was going to die and leave Clint alone in Cross’s hands. 

He pitched forward, unable to catch himself, and collapsed onto Cross’s feet. Cross swore and kicked him off, hauling him upright with a grip on his ear. The pain was fierce and white behind his eyes and overwhelmed everything but the longing to make it stop, so that he nearly missed the moment when Cross leaned forward just a little too far, just close enough for Clint to jerk his head and bite down hard on the hand holding the control device.

The piercing sound lanced once through Phil’s head, and the hold on his muscles vanished as if a single binding cord had been cut. Dizzy and weak, he struggled to stand as Clint launched himself at Cross, and the two of them crashed to the ground, fighting to reach the device, now lying an arm’s length away, in the dark pool of blood.

Clint wouldn’t give Cross an inch, biting and kicking and fighting with all the ferocity of a man bred on nothing but the need to survive, but he was losing. 

Phil’s whole body burned with the effort of standing, and the world around him twisted and spun. Still, he summoned the strength to tighten his grip on the gun still in his hand and take aim. He shook, the gun wavered, and the fight in front of him moved too quickly for him to be sure of a shot.

“Barton!” he called, as loudly as his aching throat would let him, and three things happened at once.

Clint jerked reflexively around, looking over his shoulder to answer.

Cross used Clint’s surprise to knock him off balance and throw him off, knocking him onto his knees.

Phil fired.

The bullet missed and struck the wall as Cross reached out and got hold of the control device. The push of a button sent the awful sound pulsing into Phil’s brain, and the brief moment of desperate freedom was gone.

Cross’s face was red and ugly with rage, and he backhanded Clint hard across the mouth. “You little fucking shit,” he snarled. “Gonna fucking kill you. Conrad!”

A tough-looking woman appeared at the door. “Sir?”

“Find something to do with that,” he said, gesturing at Clint. “The next time I see him, I want it to be in pieces.”

“We’ve got a few machetes.”

“Fuck him with one of them, first.”

“Fuck yourself,” Clint suggested, and the woman kicked him in the groin. Grinning, she took hold of his collar and began to drag him toward the door.

All of Phil’s focus was fixed on remaining conscious and keeping the nausea at bay, and he wasn’t quick enough to stop himself from shouting, “No!”

The woman paused, and Cross turned to him with a curious frown.

“If you hurt him....”

“You’ll what?” Cross asked. “Bleed on me?”

Phil swallowed hard and didn’t meet Clint’s blue eyes, watching him sharply. “You won’t get anything.”

Cross snorted. “I’m not getting anything _now_.”

“You’re the one on a timetable. All I have to do is wait,” Phil replied. His own voice sounded foreign, thin and distant.

Cross glanced down at Clint, then gave Phil a long, considering look. Finally, he said, “Okay, how about this.” He entered a command on the controller, and Phil’s body jerked into motion, stumbling forward in agonizing steps. “I’m not gonna touch your boyfriend.” Phil’s lurching progress came to a halt in front of where Clint knelt on the floor. “And you’re gonna get one more chance to answer my question.”

Phil watched his hands move in horror, and the fear in his stomach grew and spread, consuming everything. His left hand lifted to rest heavily on top of Clint’s head, steadying his weight on his good leg. Clint twitched under his touch, fighting against the hold that kept him in place.

“Coulson,” Clint said. “Come on. Don’t let him do this.”

The gun rose slowly, in jerking fits and starts.

Phil gritted his teeth, pouring everything he had into stopping that inexorable arc. His head ached with it, and his body shook. Still, the gun rose.

“No. No, no. Not this. Cross, stop it. Not this.”

Cross just smiled and tapped out a command. The gun stopped, resting just below Clint’s clear blue eye. The notched sight formed a slight dent in his skin.

“Come on, Phil, please. You can fight it.”

Phil could feel him trembling with tension and fear. “I can’t. Clint, I can’t.”

“You can,” Clint pleaded. “Come on. Do it. Fight it.”

“Last time, Agent Coulson,” Cross said evenly. “Where’s the safe house?”

Phil tried to remember his training, tried to summon up the oaths he had sworn and the loyalties that had driven him for so long, but all he could think of was the taste of Clint’s lips, his bright laughter, and sharp eyes in the darkness.

His finger tightened on the trigger.

“Chapinero. They’re in Chapinero.”

Everyone had a breaking point. He knew that. Years of resistance and of eviscerating the resistance of others had made him wonder, time and again, what one little thing might mark the outermost edge of his limits.

Clint blinked back at him, stricken, and he knew.

“Where in Chapinero?” Cross demanded.

“South quarter.” No hesitation, no pause. “I don’t know the street.”

“Good enough.” Cross nodded to the woman. “Go.”

Clint closed his eyes and turned away as far as he could. The gun was still shaking in Phil’s hand.

“Thank you,” Cross said pleasantly, unfolding Phil’s fingers from around the grip, “for your cooperation.”


	2. Chapter 2

“We’ve got to work on this whole getting-caught-by-the-bad-guys thing,” Clint said. “Especially if you’re gonna keep getting shot.”

Phil made a sound like the pale shadow of a laugh. “I’ll stop getting shot when you stop jumping off of buildings.”

“Haven’t done that in a while,” Clint pointed out. “Also, not the same thing.”

He rolled his shoulders to get them loose and leaned forward to brace his hands against the wall, sliding sliding them steadily upward behind him.

“No. No, I don’t consider getting shot to be a... a viable combat strategy,” Phil replied weakly. His face was grey with blood loss and slick with sickly sweat. 

With his hands as high as they would go, Clint eased back and tested the give of each shoulder. “Hey. Controlled rapid descent is a totally viable strategy.” With a jolt and a sharp stab of pain, he popped his right shoulder out of place and worked his arms over and around his head, bringing his bound hands down in front of him.

Phil watched him with hazy, heavy-lidded eyes. “Controlled being the op-... operative... word...”

He trailed off, eyes glazing, and Clint snapped, “ _Coulson_.” Phil blinked. “Hey. You saying I’m not in control?”

Phil’s stare was fixed vaguely on the side of Clint’s head. “Freefall is the opposite of control.”

Clint braced himself against the wall, counted three, and popped his shoulder back into its socket.

“If you go now, you can make it to the street before they know you’re gone.”

Clint dug the comm device out of his ear and crushed it under his heel. “Yeah, fuck that.”

He reached out to remove Phil’s comm, but Phil pulled away. “I’ll slow you down. You have to go.”

“Uh huh. Sure.” Clint gently held his head still and fished out the device. 

“Clint, I c-”

“If you say you _can’t_ one more time, I’m gonna knock you out and throw you over my shoulder.”

It came out hard and bitter, and Phil flinched. “I’m s-”

“Don’t.” Clint shook his head. One thing at a time. “Just don’t. Not now.”

He wasn’t thinking about the army of thugs bearing down on the safe house. He wasn’t thinking about Romanov and Sitwell and the two agents and six civilians and how the danger rushing toward them was his fault.

He focused on the task in front of him, on keeping his bound hands steady as he secured the tourniquet around Phil’s leg, on straining to listen for movement inside the house, on getting out of this in one piece. The rank, acid feelings churning in his gut would have their outlet later. For now, he was on the familiar footing of escape.

"Come on. We gotta go." He eased his shoulder under Phil's arm and stood carefully. Phil was breathing hard, and Clint could hear his teeth grinding, biting back groans as weight shifted on his shattered knee. "It‘s alright," Clint said. "Come on. I've got you."

"Can't carry me the whole way."

"You've carried me further," Clint replied. Phil didn't answer, but he leaned a little heavier on Clint's shoulder.

They shuffled carefully around the bodies on the floor, around the folding chair with the strips of cut restraints still lying beneath it, and found the door locked. Clint eased Phil gingerly against the wall and, after a moment’s consideration, kicked the door open. A stealthy getaway wasn’t really an option, and Clint was more concerned with hauling ass than keeping quiet.

“Barton.”

He looked to Phil, leaning against the wall with a tight, pale face.

“Please tell me you have a plan.”

Clint checked the hallway. No guards, nothing approaching that he could hear above the residual ringing in his ears. “The plan,” he said, slipping his shoulder under Phil’s arm, “is to go out the front door.”

Phil huffed, in equal parts pain and frustration. “You could j-”

“If any part of what you’re about to suggest involves leaving you here, you can stuff it.”

Faintly, Phil mumbled, “You’re impossible.”

Clint’s footsteps felt heavy and loud, but he just tried to keep steady as they made their way toward the landing above the stairs. From the corner of his eye, he could see the track of bloody footprints behind them. “Sorry. You can stuff it, _sir_.”

They would be exposed on the stairs, no way around that, and Clint prayed that most of Cross’s goons, at least, were out of the house doing their boss’s bidding. He chased that prayer with another for the lives of those his weakness had betrayed and for forgiveness.

It took more time than Clint would have liked to reach the second floor landing, but they made it that far without incident or detection. Carefully, he lowered Phil to the floor, just out of sight in a corner, and tried not to dwell on the hard, heavy tenor of his breathing. 

“Gonna clear us a path,” Clint said quietly. “Sit tight.”

Phil gave him a shallow nod and pulled himself in against the wall. The bleeding from his wound had slowed, but his leg was still soaked with blood, leaving bright red streaks on the floor where he went. They would have to do something about that, Clint knew, and about the ugly, open crevasse the bullet had ripped through Phil's knee.

First things first.

The stairway to the ground floor was open and clear and would be, if Clint judged right, just around a corner from the building’s front entrance. Windows in the lower hall showed him the hazy light of a slow-breaking morning outside, and he crept down the stairs in the peculiar quiet of post-dawn, straining to hear anything beyond his own feet and the trilling of tonitis in his head.

He saw the flicker of a shadow before he heard the guard coming, and he leapt the last few steps to the ground, catching the woman with a swift jab to the throat to stop her calling out. Before she could bring around her heavy rifle, Clint kicked her knee sideways and jerked the weapon out of her hands. Her nose broke with a sickening smack as Clint slammed the butt of the gun back into her face, and he lowered her smoothly, silently to the ground with the entangled shoulder strap.

Quickly, Clint patted down her pockets for anything useful. The cuffs on his wrists were some kind of high-tech crap, and the woman wasn’t carrying anything like Cross’s little remote control. Stuffing a switchblade and a battered cell phone in his back pocket, he peered around the corner into the foyer.

No guards inside, but he could make out movement through the thick glass windows that framed the door. At least one guard on the step, probably two. He turned and rushed back up the stairs to Phil.

Clint found him slumped in the corner, eyes lidded, his chest heaving in an unsteady rhythm. He raised his head as Clint approached, but his gaze was unfocused, searching.

“Hey. C’mon, boss, no time for naps,” Clint said, crouching next to him.

Phil coughed and drawled weakly, “Five more minutes.”

A joke, Clint thought. Good. Jokes were good. “Nope. Don’t wanna be late, do you?”

He eased his shoulder carefully under Phil’s arm. It was awkward, but there was no time to fiddle with the cuffs, not until they were clear. So they hobbled clumsily down the open stairway, and Clint tried to ignore the strained sound of Phil breathing in his ear.

In the foyer, he let Phil lean one last time against the wall. “Be right back,” he said cheerfully, and threw open the front door.

He had the switchblade through the first guard’s throat before the man could turn, and arterial spray splashed his face as he ripped the knife outward through the severed trachea. He whirled and threw the knife, underhand, so that it went spinning into the groin of the second guard. A punch in the chest cut off a cry of pain, and Clint put him on the ground with a solid blow to the head.

He picked up a heavy handgun and retrieved the knife, wiping it clean, and he left the men where they lay.

Phil was getting paler, and he stumbled as he leaned into Clint, grunting in pain. “Almost there, sir. Almost there,” Clint assured him, but Phil didn’t answer.

The paved path to the front gate was clear, and it opened at the push of a button, releasing them onto the broad, empty street.

So far, Clint thought, so good.

***

“Ow! Shit. Fuck. Goddamn cocksucking f-. _Ow!_ ”

The knife fell from Clint’s teeth, and the cuffs came open with a sputter of sparks and the smell of burnt circuits.

“Did you just electrocute yourself?”

“ _No._ ” Clint worked his jaw and spat into the septic sludge. “Maybe a little. Jesus _Christ._ ”

The dim bulb of an emergency service light cast a small circle of visibility in the wet, stinking darkness. Back in the sewer system wasn’t the best place to be with an open wound, but it would give them enough cover to pause and regroup and enough time for the reality of their predicament to sink in.

What little range of motion Phil had was gone. The stress of walking had stripped the last strength out of his knee, and now he couldn’t even move enough to lift it off of the filthy concrete he was sitting on. The wound itself was numb, but the edges of it throbbed with every heartbeat, leaving him sick and dizzy with pain.

There was another sickness that lingered like a sour taste in the back of his throat, but that was more to do with weakness than with wounds.

Gently, Clint leaned him forward to reach the cuffs on his wrists, and Phil closed his eyes against the nausea.

“I’m really really sorry about this,” Clint said.

“Don’t b- ah!” The sharp jolt of electricity stung on all Phil’s nerves at once and made him jump, sending a fresh wave of agony through his knee. Bright lights flashed behind his eyelids, and he just hoped that, if he passed out, Clint would catch him before he fell into the sewage.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Clint’s hands were on his face, the rasp of rough calluses grounding him, soothing him. Phil opened his eyes slowly to find Clint’s bright blue stare close at hand. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t.” Something sweet and bitter welled up in Phil’s throat, and he swallowed it down. “We have to keep moving.”

Clint shook his head. "Gotta take care of this, first," he said, settling his hands on either side of Phil's knee, not touching.

"There isn't much to do," Phil pointed out. "Not now, not with what we have."

"Well, we can at least keep it from getting worse." Clint worked the knife blade gingerly into the torn fabric of Phil's tac pants. "Y'know, I'm really not very good at this shit."

Careful as Clint was, the sawing of the switchblade jostled Phil's leg,and he gritted his teeth. "No, you're usually on the other side of it."

“Evidence of my dedication and courage,” Clint said. 

“Not the words that come to mind.”

Clint cut a downward notch in the fabric and tore it apart with a jerk that made Phil see stars and catch a strangled whine behind his teeth. He clutched at Clint’s shoulder, twisting the shirt in his fingers, and didn’t look down at the newly revealed mess of flesh and clotted blood. 

“So what would you call it?” Clint’s voice was tight, feigning lightness, but there was no hint of uncertainty or fear. “What words would you use? Really stretch your vocabulary, here.”

“To describe you?” Phil knew what Clint was doing, trying to keep him talking and focused, but it was hard to think about forming words as Clint began to wipe away the gore around the wound. “Reckless. Brash. Infuriating.”

“C’mon, sir, you can do better than that.”

Every touch stung and scorched on his overloaded nerves and formed a shapeless haze of pain that left him fumbling in his head for thoughts that meant nothing. He screwed his eyes shut and tried to think of words. “Ah, um... careless. Irreverent. Insubordinate.”

“Good one. That’s a good one,” Clint assured him. Phil couldn’t see what he was doing, but it _hurt_. God, it hurt. “Keep going. Gimme some more.”

Through the static agony, Phil summoned up memories of Clint in other moments, latching onto whatever impressions he found. “Loud. Thoughtless. You... uh, you leave your dirty socks everywhere.”

Clint laughed, entirely at odds with the horror under his hands. “Okay, now we get the truth.”

“Everywhere. Don’t know why,” Phil said. It was a solid line of thought, something real to cling to, and he followed it desperately. “You’re not messy, just the socks. Like the way dogs hide toys.”

“Hah. Maybe I’m marking my territory.”

Clint was packing the wound, and it felt like hot coals were being shoved into Phil’s skin. The thread of his thoughts frayed and unraveled. “Your... terri- territory... Like you... own... m-”

“Coulson?”

The haze of pain faded gently into soft, grey numbness. Nothing could touch him here, not agony or grief or the acid guilt that wouldn’t leave. He could rest, here, just for a moment.

“Phil.”

Clint’s voice was distant, like he was calling down through depths of water, and reaching up to him seemed like an insurmountable feat.

“No, no, no. Come on, now. Stay with me.”

The grey numbness was a wall. On this side, peace. On the other, pain. On the other, Clint.

“Christ, Phil, _please_. Stay with me. Come on.”

Phil forced his eyes open. Blinked. And there was Clint, holding him together with strong hands and sharp eyes.

“That’s it. There you are.” Clint smiled, bright in the dank shadows. “Come on, boss, you gotta talk to me. Tell me something.”

Somewhere, in the back of Phil’s mind, he knew that Clint was trying to keep him from going into shock, that there was still danger, that he needed to be alert and ready to move. At that moment, all he knew was it was somehow important that he keep finding words for Clint.

“Love you,” he mumbled, and Clint’s stare softened.

“Yeah, well.” He went back to work, wrapping the wound. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

The edge of the pain had given way to a deep, aching sickness, and Phil swallowed down bile. “Told... told you everything already. Rest is... classified.”

“Bullshit.” Clint pulled tight on the binding, and Phil’s vision swam. “Hey, hey. Steady. Okay, tell me, um, your first kiss. You never told me about that.”

Phil breathe slowly, fighting back nausea with memory. “Aiden Sheppard. Eighth grade. He... he had freckles.”

“Sounds like a keeper,” Clint said. There was a smile in his voice, like a gold thread wrapped around steel. “How about your first boyfriend?”

There was a name on the tip of Phil’s tongue, but it vanished as Clint loosened the tourniquet and numbed skin and nerves were suddenly flooded with blood and horrible sensation. He cried out, loud in the close tunnel, and stopped himself by biting hard into his lip.

“Sorry. Sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s okay. You’re okay,” Clint said evenly. He ran his thumb gently along the corner of Phil’s mouth. “No. Come on. Don’t do that. It’s okay.”

It took a deliberate force of will to unclench his jaw, and Phil tasted blood in the indentations left by his teeth. 

Clint’s thumb traced the line of his lip, soothing. “You want something to bite on?”

The words were the only thing keeping him grounded. If he cut them off, he would drift again. Phil shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, it’s... I can do it. Keep going.”

“Okay.” Clint gave his lip a last soft touch and went back to loosening the tourniquet, sliding the belt down to hold the bandages in place. “Okay, so, yeah, come on. First love. Tell me about that.”

That was easy. “You.”

Clint shot him a look. “Oh, fuck off.”

“It’s true.” There might have been preludes, but there had only ever been one conclusion. “Everything else was practice.”

Clint snorted, shaking his head. “Man, if the bad guys knew what a sap you are...” 

He trailed off, and the ugly truth of it was there in the end of that sentence. There was no _if_ , not anymore. Because, this time, the bad guy had known; Cross had known, and he had used it.

“I’m sorry,” Phil said. He wasn’t, not in any way that made a difference, but those were the only words he could find.

"Don't. Just... don't." Clint wasn't looking at him. He secured the belt with a gentle tug that set spots flashing across Phil's vision. "Okay, _now_ we have to get moving."

The idea of standing, much less walking, made Phil want to lie down and never move again, but he let Clint lift him and swallowed back his groans. "Not sure how far I'm going to get," he gasped.

"Far as you need to," Clint said. "I can carry you from there."

With Clint holding him up, Phil managed an unsteady hobble, and they set off down the tunnel into the close, reeking darkness.

***

There was nowhere to go.

There was no plan, no exit strategy. The only tangible goal was to get away as far and fast as possible, and, given Phil’s condition, they wouldn’t be covering any kind of distance with much speed. In lieu of any brighter ideas, Clint just kept walking, his arm tight around Phil.

He didn’t think about the safe house, emptied and burned out by now, or about the feel of a hot gun barrel digging into the skin of his face. 

“Let’s take a break for a minute.”

Daylight streamed down from a storm drain, illuminating the edge of a wide, waist-high shelf in the concrete, clear but for a few damp patches of detritus from the gutter above.

“Can’t,” Phil said, winded and rough. “We’ve got to... to keep moving.”

“We keep going at this rate, you’re gonna keel over.” Clint tried guiding him toward the shelf, but Phil twisted in his grip, stumbling.

“I can’t afford to rest.” he insisted, shaking his head. “Cross’s people will be looking for us, and if th-”

“They’re not gonna find us down here,” Clint pointed out. “And we have to assume that... that the safe house is compromised. So the only hurry is to get the fuck outta Dodge as fast as we can, but the only place we’re gonna get by running blind in the dark is _dead_. So sit down, shut up, and take a goddamn nap.”

Phil blinked, startled, and Clint saw the muscles in his throat shift as he swallowed. “Clint...”

“Stop. Just...” He ran a hand over his face, feeling suddenly weak and small under the weight of the past day. “Just stop, okay? We’ll rest for a minute, then keep moving. We’ve got a long way to go, and we’ve got to keep it steady.”

Phil opened his mouth to speak, and Clint braced himself for another empty apology, for a reminder that Clint could get there faster and safer on his own. After a second, Phil shut his mouth without a word and looked away, and that, somehow, was worse.

“Come on,” Clint said, helping Phil up onto the ledge. “We’ll both be a lot less grouchy after a break.”

Phil hissed in pain at every movement, but he managed to drag himself up to rest with his back against the wall. Clint settled in close beside him and allowed himself a moment to savor the simple comfort of touch. Phil’s hand shifted, coming to rest with the backs of his fingers pressed lightly against Clint’s wrist.

“I know you’re angry...”

“I’m not...” Clint broke off. He _was_ angry, curbing a vague rage that licked at the underside of his heart like a low, seething fire, banked now by exhaustion. “It doesn’t matter. All we have to worry about right now is getting outta here. I promise not to get pissy and lose my head.”

Phil frowned. “That’s not wh-”

“I know.” Clint sighed. “I know that’s not what you meant, and I know we have to keep moving, and I know this is fucked, and I just... I know, okay? Just let me deal with one thing at a fucking time.”

There was a brief, endless pause, then Phil shifted his hand away and didn’t answer.

Clint waited to close his eyes until Phil’s breathing had evened out into the smooth cadence of sleep, and, when he did, he dreamed of the dark and blood and the smell of ashes and shit.

He blinked awake slowly, eyes sore and heavy, searching for some scrap of illumination, but the glow of sunlight spilling through the storm drain had been replaced by the cool flicker of street lights. 

“Shit.” He’d only meant to rest for an hour. It would be easier to move under cover of night, but they’d wasted too much time. “Coulson, wake up. We gotta move.”

Phil’s head was lolled against Clint’s shoulder, his face still and pale in the dim light. Clint raised a hand to shake him, paused, and instead ran his thumb gently along the line of Phil’s jaw. 

“Hey,” he said quietly. “Phil.”

Phil stirred, furrowing his brow, and his eyes cracked open. Clint let his hand linger, fingers curled lightly around the side of Phil’s neck, feeling the slick touch of cold sweat on hot skin and the movement of muscles as Phil swallowed and looked around.

“How long...”

“Longer than we should’ve,” Clint sighed. “You feel okay to get going?”

“No.” Phil cleared his throat and sat up slowly, groaning. “But we have to get going, regardless.”

A thousand things to say rose in Clint’s mouth and stayed there like a foul taste. He had assurances, comforts, and recriminations for days, but none of it would make a damn second of difference. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, well. Come on. Gotta be a way out, somewhere.”

Even in the middle of the night staying out of sight remained a challenge, especially at their hampered speed, but Clint wasn’t about to spend a second longer in the tunnels. They managed well enough, pausing for brief meals of stolen water and protein bars that Clint lifted from a corner store. He would need to steal medical supplies, too, but they wouldn’t do much good without a safe place to use them, or at least a place where sounds of pain would go unheard.

He could hear the rough, scraping noise of Phil grinding his teeth as every step jolted his leg, and Clint would have given both his own hands to offer any relief.

It took the better part of three hours to reach Chapinero, creeping and stumbling every step of the way. With the minutes past midnight ticking away, Clint picked the locks on an empty shop front, and they took refuge on the floor of a secluded store room.

“You take me to the nicest places,” Phil panted, settling back against the wall.

Clint snorted. “You should see what I have planned for our honeymoon.”

Phil huffed out a laugh, short and strained. “Are we getting married?”

And there it was, the moment, the perfect opening, and Clint... couldn’t take it, not now, not with bitter guilt still burning at the back of his throat. Instead, he forced a grin that he knew couldn’t possibly look real. “Sure. You’d look great in a white dress.”

The room was windowless and empty, lit by a single bare bulb, and the dust on the floor suggested that the previous occupants had been absent for a while. The door locked from the outside, but it would be easy enough to barricade, if need be. Clint desperately hoped not to test that theory.

“This should do for a little while, anyway,” he said, crouching beside Phil. “Long enough to regroup a little.”

“A sandwich and some aspirin and we’ll be right as rain,” Phil said dryly. He looked pinched and washed-out in the harsh light, shadows tight at the corners of his eyes.

“Yeah, I’m working on that.” Clint pulled the gun out of his waistband and laid it on the floor within easy reach. Handing Phil the cell phone, he said, “If I’m not back in two hours...”

“If you’re not back in _one_ hour,” Phil cut him off, “I will crawl out of here and go get you myself.”

Clint gave him a look. “You do know you can’t actually do that, right? I’m sincerely worried you’re gonna try.”

Phil stared right back, unflinching. “If you’re back in an hour, then there’s nothing to worry about.”

Scrubbing a hand over his face, Clint sighed. “Is this what it’s like dealing with me?”

“More or less.” Something strange flickered over Phil’s face. “Just... Please don’t do anything stupid.”

Clint raised an eyebrow. “Define stupid.”

“Stupid, English, adjective. Foolish or unnecessarily dangerous, e.g. investigating a compromised SHIELD safe house.”

Clint held his gaze, just for a second, then stood. “I have to.”

“Clint.”

“ _I have to._ ” He ran a hand through his hair. “What if Cross didn’t find them?"

Phil sighed, weary and worn. “You know he must have.”

“What if they got out?”

“They wouldn’t have had time.”

“What if they’re still there? What if they’re pinned down?”

“Clint, stop it.”

“No,” he snapped. “I have to go. I have to see.”

“ _Why?_ Why is it so important?”

“Because it’s my fault!”

There was a beat of such absolute silence that Clint could hear his pulse pounding in his head.

Phil blinked. “You think this is your fault?”

Clint gave him a hard look. “Oh, I’m willing to share the blame.”

Phil jerked back as though Clint had slapped him. He looked down at his hands, resting in his lap, and said evenly, “I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not,” Clint said. The bitter rage seething in his chest flared into something acidic and ugly. “You’re not. Jesus Christ. What the fuck is wrong with you?” Phil’s hands curled into fists, and Clint knew, deep in the part of his brain that was trained for survival, that now was the time to stop. “If you’re right, then they’re dead, do you get that? Natasha and Jasper and Christians and Okene. They’re _dead_ because you decided _my_ life was worth more than theirs.” Phil closed his eyes, and Clint should have shut his mouth but every wretched feeling of the last twenty-four hours came tumbling up behind his teeth. “Fuck you. You don’t get to decide that. You don’t get to sell them out like that. Not for me, not for my life.”

“It wasn’t for you.”

Phil didn’t look up, but his voice was so sharp and cold that Clint felt it stab through his heart.

“What?”

“Do you know what would have happened? If I had... If Cross had made me shoot you?” There was a streak of dried blood running down Phil’s calf, soaked into the top of his boot, and he was staring at it. “If I was very, _very_ lucky, he would have gotten tired of his stupid game and just made me shoot myself.” He rubbed at his eyes, his knuckles scraped and dirty. “Probably not, though. He probably would have kept trying to get whatever he could. He would have left me there, in that room, with you, for... hours, days, however long it took him to break me down or for SHIELD to manage a rescue. Then, maybe, I would have gone home, in pieces, and various experts in relevant fields would have done their best to put me back together.” He sighed, angry and resigned to a future that wouldn’t happen, and Clint felt sick. “And, eventually, there’d be something. Maybe the smell of coffee, or one of your stupid dirty socks, or even just one bad dream too many. Either way, it would be something, and one day I’d take the same damn gun and put a bullet in my own head, because there is only so fucking much that I can take.”

Finally, he looked up, and there was nothing in his stare that asked for understanding or forgiveness, just a steady, certain grief that made Clint feel like all his anger had burned his stomach to ash.

“Maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do, and it certainly wasn’t the brave thing to do.” The cold in Phil’s voice was gone, but the edge remained. “But it wasn’t for you, and it’s _not_ your fault.”

Somewhere, in the infinite assemblies of sounds and expressions in all human interaction, there must have been an answer, some right thing to do or say that would resolve the roiling mess of bile and barbed wire caged inside Clint’s ribs.

He swallowed hard and said quietly, hoarsely, “I’ll be back in an hour.”

He didn’t look back, and the door closed behind him with a muted _click_ , shutting away the light from the single, bare bulb.


	3. Chapter 3

An hour came and an hour went, and Clint didn’t come back.

Phil refused to panic, burying his fear beneath the constant ache that throbbed in his leg and echoed in his head. A feverish haze gathered at the edges of his thoughts, tinged with the tantalizing promise of oblivion, and he pushed it away, unwilling to sacrifice even a moment’s clarity.

As the second hour drew on, he dragged himself slowly out of the storeroom and into the deserted shop front, searching for a source of running water and a distraction from his agony and apprehension. Near the shop’s back entrance, he found a faucet that trickled warm, coppery water, and he drank from it gratefully, dizzy with the effort of moving even a short distance under his own power.

If Clint didn’t come back...

Phil shook his head, closing his eyes against a wave of nausea. Clint might be late, he might return battered and worse for wear, but he would be back. For the time being, Phil had no choice but to rest his hope on that certainty, and, instead of dwelling on the hundred horrors that might have slowed Clint down, he gritted his teeth and turned his attention to the mess of bloodied rags wrapped around his knee.

It wasn’t the worst injury he’d had to deal with on his own, and it certainly wasn’t the first. In a flash, he thought suddenly of Clint, laid out in the back of a convenience store, and the pull of black thread around a jagged, red wound. It might have been a thousand years ago or last week for how much and how little everything had changed. The only real difference, Phil thought, was that he had so much more to lose.

The rags were soaked through, stiff and sticky with dried and clotted blood, and they unwound to issue a sickly, metallic smell. Every shift of the ruined fabric stung in the open wound, but Phil clenched his jaw and kept at it until the mangled mess of skin and muscle was bare. He choked back the wave of nausea, breathed deep, and set to rinsing out the filthy bandages.

Sitting on the ground, there was no way to keep the water from splashing onto him, and soon his side was soaked and chafing. The tepid water and motionless air offered no relief from the heat trapped in his skin, and Phil thought of heavy summer rain on a mountain slope and the chilling touch of bloodless lips.

With the rags as clean as they were going to get, he draped them over his shoulder and turned carefully, positioning his knee under the dribbling water. The warm stream struck on undamaged skin and ran over the mess of red, and water met wound with such sudden, shredding pain that Phil shoved a fist into his mouth to keep from crying out. He bit down hard as clumps of blood and bits of skin rinsed away, hot tears stinging at the corners of his eyes. 

The fever haze crept up in his head with empty promises of sweet dreams and painless sleep, and he ground his teeth into his knuckles to drive it back. Focus, think, solve the problem.

He needed his hands, needed to work on cleaning the wound out properly. The water was doing its job, revealing the inflamed furrow carved by the bullet’s path, but Phil would need to clear away the grit and gore inside the gaping gash and rewrap it.

He took his hand from his mouth and gripped his leg above the knee, forcing himself to breathe deeply in and slowly out, casting about for something to keep his mind clear and present. He thought of Clint and his questions, of the fight for words that anchored him in the rank dark, and the only words that would come were model statistics for the 1962 Chevy Corvette.

Phil took a deep breath and began evenly, “Last production year for first generation Corvette. Last model to use solid-rear-axle suspension.” He eased his knee more directly under the faucet, letting the flow of water run into the open wound, and kept his mind on the words. “Exposed headlights, introduction of rocker panel trim, increased engine displacement to three twenty-seven cubic inches.”

The wound was swollen, oozing blood and fluid from red edges, and the unbroken skin around it was hot and tender. Phil swiped at it gingerly to clear away the clots of older blood and went on, “Optional power convertible top, fifteen thousand units produced, last year to...” His vision swam, and he paused, breathing hard. “Fourteen thousand five hundred units produced.” A crippling injury was no excuse to get the facts wrong. “Last model with a trunk until nineteen ninety-eight.”

He shut off the faucet and could have cried with relief as the thin layer of water began to cool on his skin. The wound needed to be cleaned with something more than water and wrapped with something better than the dirty strips cut from his trousers, but his options, for the moment, were limited.

Through the shuttered windows of the shop front, the silvery light of a quiet dawn was just beginning to creep down among the street lamps and headlights, and the fear that Phil had shoved down beneath the pain started to rise again. Two hours, at least, had gone, and still there was no sign of Clint.

Visions of Clint gunned down in the early morning street flashed unbidden across Phil’s mind. Unseeing blue eyes gone grey in the pale light, blood glistening black on the concrete and running thickly over trash in the gutter.

He started on the stats for the ‘63 Corvette and climbed slowly to something resembling a standing position, leaning heavily on the wall as he hobbled back to the empty storeroom. This time, he left the light off and the door cracked just enough that he could see through it to the front, keeping watch for Clint and continuing his litany of engine details and optional features.

By the time he made it through 1984, his throat was raw and the persistent panic had become tangled with the fever haze in his head, both threatening to overwhelm him as the hours drew on and the day outside grew brighter.

“An hour, you said. Back in an hour,” Phil muttered vaguely to himself. How long had it been? Could he walk enough to go after Clint? The pain seemed somehow disconnected, now, like he was remembering to feel it only a few seconds after the signal had sparked in his nerves. The gun was still in his pocket, and the weight of it was unbearable in his hand as he tried to pull it out.

His mouth was parched, sapped of moisture by the rising heat and his constant recitation, but Phil swallowed and resolutely began another set of facts and numbers. “Clinton Francis Barton, codename Hawkeye, field agent level six C, specialist classification.” He braced himself against the wall and levered carefully up on his good leg. It seemed harder to stand, this time, and his head spun as he moved. “Authentication code romeo omega nine one nine, serial number one six zero five zero...” No, no that was too many zeroes. What was the number?

Phil’s leg shook under him, and he stumbled as he reached for the storeroom door. “Zero five... two... five two zero... one one four seven.” Daylight streamed in through the front windows, brighter, he thought, than it should have been. “Personnel ID code four four seven golf dash india alpha.”

There was a space between the doorway and the next wall, just a few steps, and Phil was sure he had strength enough to cross it. “Date of birth March t-” He let go of the doorframe and took a step, faltering and falling forward. His damaged knee met the floor with an explosion of pain, and he wondered at the strange, weightless feeling as the world vanished into black.

***

It was an apartment on the top floor of a highrise, open floor, plenty of space. The plan, as Clint understood it, had been to signal for extraction as soon as the civilians were secure, quick chopper pick up from the roof, and everybody goes home.

Except the signal never came; the extraction never happened. Somehow, the mission had been compromised and everything had gone suddenly, horribly wrong.

He circled the building, looking for a watch, and saw no one. The halls of the highrise were empty and quiet but for the faint buzzing of light bulbs, a dim drone against the silence of the small hours. Clint kept his face turned away from the security camera that blinked sullenly above the door to the stairwell. There was no other surveillance, no one to mark his intrusion, but the skin on his neck itched with the unmistakable, inescapable feeling of being watched.

The familiar paranoia was a comfort, and he wasn’t thinking about a streak of blood and a windowless room and the tangle of guilt like barbed wire in his gut.

In the long hallway of the top floor, Clint froze, and the heavy stairwell door slammed shut behind him.

Crisscrossing ribbons of yellow police tape cordoned off a section of the hall, caging in the stark patterns of blood spatter and bullet holes that dotted the wall and floor. A single black fly flitted lazily between spots of blackened blood, searching for some fresh bit of gore. Clint’s stomach clenched, and he forced himself forward, one shaking step at a time, until he ducked beneath the yellow barrier and stood in what remained of the kicked-in doorway.

There were no bodies, but Clint could see the scene clearly enough, even in the dim night-time light that filtered through the windows. The apartment’s open floor plan, so efficient for housing a cluster of refugees and SHIELD agents, had become a shooting gallery. The entire back wall had been shredded by gunfire and splashed with long swatches of blood where bullet-riddled bodies had fallen backward and slid slowly down to the floor. Clint’s shadow cut across a wild smear on the floor that mapped out the brief trek of someone who had tried desperately to crawl away.

A picture of Romanov, bleeding out and furious, rose up in his imagination, and Clint shut his eyes.

This was the cost of Clint’s survival. Nine dead, shot up like fish in a barrel, just because Phil loved him too much to pull the trigger. His knees quaked, and he sat, his back to the wall below a spray of bullet holes, and buried his face in his hands.

Down the hall, the heavy stairwell door slammed.

Clint was on his feet, moving deeper into the apartment before the sound of voices reached him. He ducked behind the door of a small bedroom and peered through the gap between the hinges, palming the small knife as two men appeared in the shadowed interior, backlit by the bright light from the hallway.

“... come back here?”

“Boss thinks it’s worth keeping an eye on, so we’re keeping an eye on it. You’re the one who said you saw somebody.”

“I thought I saw some _thing_. Coulda been a dog or one of those kids downstairs.”

The overhead light switched on, and Clint drew back slightly from the gap as the two men looked around the wrecked apartment.

“See?” one of them said. “Nothing. Let’s go.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

The light went off again, and the two men disappeared back into the hallway, mumbling irritably to each other. Clint breathed out slowly and slipped the knife back into his pocket. _Stupid._ Phil was right; as Clint’s plans went, this one was pretty fucking stupid.

But now he knew. He’d seen the price of his life written in splattered blood, and now the razors of guilt in his stomach had become a heavy weight with known dimensions. Now he knew the shape of what he had to atone for.

It was still, Clint admitted, a stupid plan with selfish motives, and, for the moment, it was time to stop beating himself up and take care of Phil.

_There is only so fucking much that I can take._

Clint shook his head. Later. Later, when they were home and safe and no one was actively trying to kill them, then they could figure out... whatever this meant, if it meant anything. They’d fight it out and fuck it out, and everything would be fine. He wouldn’t let himself think of the little box in the nightstand or of all the potential promises circumscribed in a simple steel ring.

He allowed enough time for the two men to get back to their post, wherever it was, before he crept back into the bright hallway and the yellow-tape cage. As he pulled open the heavy stairwell door, Clint thought that Romanov would call him an idiot for wasting this kind of time, then he remembered that she wouldn’t be there to call him names or tease him or tell him to shut up when he was being an asshole.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “God, Natasha, I’m so sorry.”

No one heard him but the concrete stairs and the single, black fly still buzzing back and forth above the dried blood. This time, he didn’t let the door slam.

There was a medical clinic on the next block, and any conflict he felt about stealing supplies was resolved by the necessity of looking after Phil. He could take what he needed and be back to their refuge, if not within the established hour, at least inside of two. They could rest through the day in relative safety and move out again with nightfall. Clint was oh for two with his plans, though, and he prayed that, for once, things might work out alright.

On the ground floor of the apartment building, Clint opened a side door onto the still, warm night, and saw Cross’s two minions sharing a cigarette in the circle of yellow light from a dirty street lamp.

He froze, and the two men gaped at him in surprise.

“Uh. Hey, guys.”

“Holy shit,” one of them swore, and the other reached for his gun.

Clint was already running for his life.

Okay. New plan.

He raced down the street, listening for the footsteps of his pursuers ringing loud behind him. Even if they were dumb enough to start shooting on the street, they wouldn’t be able to hit him as long as they were running.

The deafening sound of a gunshot thundered through the quiet night, and the windshield of a parked car shattered as Clint passed it. So they _were_ dumb enough to start shooting, or they just didn’t care. Right.

He darted into a dark alley and doubled back, crossing the street behind them. He whistled as he dashed around another shadowed corner and heard the skitter of boots as they scrambled to correct their course and follow him.

“That’s it, assholes,” Clint muttered. “Let’s play chase.”

However this ended, it would bring Cross and the rest of his goons sniffing around, and Clint preferred that happen as far as possible from where Phil was hiding. The further away he led them, the further away they’d be looking, and he planned to lead them far afield before this game was over.

Another shot rang out, sending a shower of brick fragments down on Clint’s head, and he hoped these losers didn’t get anyone killed before he was done with them. He heard one of them shouting, yelling a frantic report into his phone and demanding back-up.

In the dark canyons of city streets, Clint could have disappeared; given a thirty-second lead and a little bit of luck, he could have vanished completely and left the best trackers running in circles. For now, he moved in and out of shadows, cutting across streets and over parked cars, just far enough ahead to let them think they had a chance in hell of catching him. He was starting to tire, dizzy with two days worth of exhaustion, when the sharp wail of a police siren came cutting through the night.

Game on. Level two.

Clint ducked around a corner and into the cover of a row of trash bins. When the first of his two pursuers came close, Clint kicked the man’s legs out from under him and twisted the gun from his hand in a swift, sure movement. The second man came barrelling into view, and Clint shot him cleanly through the shin. He skidded face-first onto the concrete with a blood-curdling scream, and Clint sprinted past him, scooping up the fallen gun as he went.

Armed and determined, he left the two men where they lay and went running headlong toward the blaring sirens just as the morning sun began to break over the eastern skyline.

***

Waking up was like swimming through dark water, reaching for unknown air in a sea so cold it burned. A hand touched his face, and waking up was like drowning.

“Phil? Phil, come on. Christ.”

His eyes blinked open onto a meaningless horizon, a flat expanse of floor cast in grey shadows. The pain that had been kept at bay by unconsciousness washed over him, and Phil shut his eyes again, groaning.

“Fuck,” Clint sighed. His hand was cool against Phil’s cheek, the only sweet thing in a mire of bitter misery. “You fucking asshole. You really tried to come after me, didn’t you?”

Phil opened his mouth to answer, but his tongue was so dry that it stuck and scraped against the back of his teeth. Everything in his head felt fuzzy and wrong. He swallowed and tried again. “You’re late.”

There was a pause, and Phil cracked his eyes, canting his gaze up to catch the blurred edge of Clint’s face. “Yeah. Sorry about that,” Clint said. “You were right. Dumb idea.” He lifted a small bag off the floor. “But hey, I brought you a present.”

“Is it a...” Phil tried to lift his head, but a wave of nausea convinced him that was a poor choice. “Is it a new leg and a quinjet?”

“Damn. I was saving that for your birthday.”

Clint’s other hand slipped under Phil’s shoulder and gently rolled him to his back. His injured knee straightened with a jolt, despite Clint’s care, and Phil bit back a whine.

“Sorry! Sorry,” Clint said. His face was streaked with dirt and lined with exhaustion, but there were no new bruises or cuts, no sign that he was hurt or afraid or anything but tense and tired. Phil let out a slow breath, and something in his chest eased as Clint laid a hand gently over his heart.

“You okay to move?” Clint asked. “We still gotta hunker down here for a little while.”

Moving slowly, Phil levered himself up onto his elbows, and Clint pulled him into a sitting position. He breathed in deep and waited for the spinning in his head to stop, anchored by the solid weight of Clint’s hand on his shoulder. There was a black splatter of blood on the floor where his knee, now badly swollen beneath the bandages, had struck. The gold sunshine of late afternoon filtered in through the shuttered storefront.

“How long were you gone?” Phil asked, and Clint dropped his eyes.

“Longer than I meant to be,” he admitted. “I ran into some trouble.”

Phil frowned. “What kind of trouble?”

“The kind that have guns and yell a lot?” Clint tried for a grin and didn’t quite make it. “I had to give them the runaround, keep them off the trail.” Phil started to swear, but Clint cut him off. “Look, I know, okay? It was stupid. I shoulda just got the supplies and came back, and I’m sorry. I just... I had to see. I’m sorry.”

The fact that Clint carried any of the weight in this was twisted and wrong, but the sick truth was that he would have to carry all of it. Whatever the consequences, Phil couldn’t regret his choice.

“I’m just glad you’re back,” he said, and Clint looked away.

“We should be safe enough here until later tonight. Then we can steal a car and book it out of this shitstorm.”

“We’re still a full day’s drive from the closest border,” Phil pointed out. “Plenty of time for Cross to catch up.”

Clint shrugged. “So I’ll drive fast. Anyway, we can figure that out later. Let’s get you sorted and get some sleep.”

Phil looked toward the open storage room, just a few feet away. He thought of trying to stand again and swallowed down bile. “At the risk of my dignity, it might be best if you just drag me.”

Clint glanced at his swollen knee, frowning. “It’s gonna hurt.”

“Standing on it will hurt worse.”

“Fair enough.” Clint stood behind Phil, taking hold of his raised arms. “Ready?” he asked, and Phil nodded. Clint was strong enough to drag him smoothly across the short space, but even the slightest movement made the wound sting and throb.

Once Phil was propped up against the storeroom wall, Clint retrieved the supplies and shut the door before switching on the light. The sudden brightness burned in Phil’s eyes, making his aching head pound. Clint dropped onto the floor beside him and started emptying out the bag with a grim expression.

“I had to grab what I could, but I figure anything’s better than dirty water and torn-up pants.” He produced a small bottle of vodka, some water, and a bundle of new t-shirts.

“It’ll do,” Phil said, and Clint gave him a thin smile.

“Do me a favor? Don’t ever make me do this again.”

Phil smiled back weakly. “Deal.”

Unwrapping the wound hurt less, somehow, under Clint’s hands, but Phil still had to grit his teeth as the tattered fabric stuck and pulled. Clint sucked in a breath. “Shit. Okay, this... probably looks worse than it is, but it looks bad.”

Phil’s knee was swollen and dark with bruises, and the edges of the wound were red and raw, seeping blood and fluid. It would take surgery, physical therapy, and months of healing before he was anywhere near fighting form again, and what they had, for the moment, was cheap alcohol and a few hours of rest.

“Just do it.”

Clint nodded. “Okay. Yeah.” He picked up one of the t-shirts and used his knife to cut off the sleeves. As he reached for the bottle of water, he said, “So talk to me. Tell me something.”

Phil stared at the mess of his ruined knee and tried to think of something mundane. "Uh, did I tell you my dad called last Tuesday?"

"No." Clint dripped water into the wound, and Phil closed his eyes against a wave of new pain. "What did he have to say?"

"Very little." Phil felt dizzy and weak, and he clung to this small tether of normalcy. "Basically, if I don't start answering my messages, he's going to disown me and adopt you."

Clint snorted but kept his eyes down as he dabbed gently at the wound with the t-shirt sleeve. "Don't feel bad. He just pretends to like me better."

"He _does_ like you better," Phil said through clenched teeth. He tried to keep still, but his muscles spasmed under every stinging touch. "Wish I knew how you won him over."

"It's because he knows I'm scared of him," Clint said. He reached for the vodka and hesitated, looking up at Phil. "So this is gonna hurt like fuck."

Phil picked up the bloodied belt and slid it between his teeth. He gave Clint a short nod and hoped he looked more ready than he felt. Clint braced Phil's leg with one hand and, with the other, slowly tipped the bottle.

It had been a long time since he'd had to wash a wound with alcohol, but Phil remembered what it felt like, remembered the sudden searing pain and the explosion of white lights behind his eyes. Unforgettable as it was, the sensation slammed into him, and the white lights knocked him hard into black unconsciousness.

He came back to the touch of a hand wrapped around the back of his neck, a thumb stroking gently along the corner of his jaw.

"...little water, and you can sleep," Clint was saying softly. "Come on, Phil. Just for a minute."

Phil blinked the dark out of his eyes and found Clint's face close to his, eyes bright and worried beneath a knitted brow. The edge of a plastic bottle brushed against Phil's lips, and he parted them, swallowing gratefully as Clint tilted the water up into his mouth.

"Okay. There we go." Clint pulled the bottle away and took a swallow for himself. He slipped his arm around Phil's shoulders and settled back against the wall. "Now you can go back to sleep. I'll wake you when it's time to move."

Phil's skin felt hot and tight in the stifling room, but nothing could have persuaded him to move away from Clint's hold. "You are not," he said weakly.

Clint tilted his head to look at Phil, frowning. "I'm not what?"

Phil swallowed, his mouth still dry despite the water. "Afraid of my dad."

"Hah!" Clint huffed. "Phil, there are three people on earth who scare the living shit out of me, and your dad is one of them."

"He can be intimidating, I guess." Phil's eyelids drooped, heavy with exhaustion. The pain in his leg thudded through him, dull and pervasive, and he lowered his head to Clint's shoulder. "Who are the other two?"

"Fury and N- and Natasha," Clint replied. After a moment, he added quietly, "Guess the world's a little less scary, now."

Phil didn't have an answer for that, and any flash of feeling was subsumed beneath blissful nothingness as he dropped silently back to sleep.

The promise of peaceful slumber proved false, and he woke gasping from a dream of being suffocated under the cinders and ash of a dead fire.

"Hey. Hey, no. You're okay. I've got you," Clint soothed. He ran his fingers gently over Phil's cheek and paused. "You feel okay?"

Phil tried for an expression of sarcasm, but he only managed to shake his head weakly. "Water?" he asked, and the bottle appeared at his mouth. The liquid was warm and stale, but it was a sweet relief to the heat inside him.

"You're burning up," Clint said. "Here, lay down." He shifted over so that Phil could lie to the side and rest his head on Clint's thigh. There was movement, then a damp cloth was laid across Phil's forehead. "It's okay. You're gonna be fine."

"No," he murmured. "No, I don't think so."

Clint made a sound of dismay, but he just carded his fingers through Phil's hair and didn't answer.

There were three kinds of fatal injuries in the field. The most merciful were the ones that killed outright, headshots and gut wounds and arterial damage that at least offered the promise of an end, however much time and pain it took to get there. There were the broken bones and flesh wounds, the ones that slowed the victim down just enough for something or someone more deadly to catch up. Then there were wounds like this, ones that went too long unattended and allowed infection to take hold.

There was still time, still a chance for the proverbial bullet to miss, but Phil suspected that the window was quickly closing. He shut his eyes and dozed fitfully.

When he woke again, it was from a dream of being torn from his bed and thrown into a blazing fire, and he thrashed so violently that it jarred his knee. He jerked awake with a cry of pain, his heart pounding, and Clint laid a hand on his chest to steady him.

"Whoa. Okay. You're okay. I'm here. I've got you."

Phil made himself breathe, but his lungs felt hot and leaden, suffocating under the constriction of his own fevered skin. His thoughts raced in fragments, timelines and protocols and facts from his training, and he knew, no matter how fast Clint drove or what supplies he stole, time was running out.

"Clint..."

Clint was already reaching for a new water bottle, pressing it to Phil's lips. "I'm here. It's okay. I'm here."

Water dripped from the corner of Phil's mouth, a cool stream on his burning cheek. He felt thin and scorched, nothing but bones left to bleach in the desert sun. But not yet. There was still something... There were a million things, so many hours he still needed. He turned his head, breathing in the close smell of Clint's skin and clothes, and tried to hold onto the thought.

"Listen..." The sound scraped in his throat, and he swallowed, trying to ease the passage of his speech. "Listen to me. When you... when you get back, tell... tell Nick you want to invoke clause five."

There was a long pause, and Phil cracked his eyes, squinting against the harsh light. His vision was hazy with fever, but he could make out Clint's face frowning down at him, haloed by the glare from the single bare bulb.

"Whatever it is, it can wait," Clint said flatly.

Phil pulled himself into a sitting position, shaking his head. The movement made his senses spin, and he would have fallen over but for Clint's strong arms around him. "No, no. Not anymore." He twisted his fingers in Clint's shirt, holding himself up so that he could look Clint in the eye. "Terms of employment, section F, subsection four, clause five. It can... it's like a posthumous marriage license."

Clint blinked. "It's a _what_?"

"You're already my... my beneficiary." It hurt so much to talk, to breathe, to be so afraid. His hands were shaking. "Clause five would... you would get everything else. Rights and the apartment and..."

"Stop it," Clint cut him off. "I don't want any of your shit, I just... I just want to go home."

"I know. I know." Phil rested his head in the crook of Clint's neck and let Clint hold him. "But it's... there's money. Enough to quit, enough to leave, and you could..." His tears were scalding in the corners of his eyes. "You could have a life."

“Shut up.” Clint’s voice was tight and raw. “You’re delirious. You’re gonna be fine.”

Between the fever, dehydration, exhaustion, and the dull, aching fear that pounded in his chest, Phil might well have been delirious, but he knew - had known for hours - that he wasn’t going to be fine.

“Just promise me,” he begged. “Clint, please.”

“Fine,” Clint snapped. His chest rose and fell against Phil, and he said again, softly, “Fine. When you kick the bucket, in the very distant future, I promise to ask Fury about fucking clause five, okay?”

Phil sighed, and some of the urgency settled. “Okay. Thank you.”

Clint held him tighter, so close that the heat of it was stifling, but Phil would rather die suffocating in Clint’s arms than comfortable and cool on the floor. The fever haze buzzed in his head, lulling him in the silence, but he pushed away the call of sleep, grasping instead at the stillness of the moment and the rasp of Clint’s stubble and the clarity he could feel slipping away.

In a lost, ragged voice, Clint said, “I was gonna ask, y’know.”

“What?” Phil asked, his throat still raw and sore.

“The other night, before Fury called,” Clint said quietly, like something inside him was breaking apart. “I was gonna wait until... y’know, until you were all fucked-out and happy, and then I was gonna pull out this ring and be all smooth about it.”

Phil’s heart thudded, weak and heavy. “You were... you wanted to get married?”

“ _Want_ ,” Clint said. “I _want_ to get married. So you gotta hold on a little longer so I can ask you for real, okay?”

Somewhere, deep underneath the throbbing pain and fevered fear, was a flicker of happiness, of hope, but Phil couldn’t reach it. All he could find was a sharp sadness that welled up through the cracks in his heart and dripped bitterly on his tongue.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and he meant it. “Clint, I’m so sorry.”

Clint just held him tighter and said nothing.


	4. Chapter 4

The way Clint saw it, there were two options.

Phil had a day, probably less, and it would take at least that long to make it to the border and find a hospital on safe ground. The most likely end to option one involved Phil dying in the backseat of a stolen car, which meant that option one wasn’t actually an option.

Option two, then.

Phil had dropped back into uneven sleep, and he stirred, murmuring as Clint lowered him gently to the floor.

"It's okay. I'll be right back," Clint soothed. He ran his fingers softly over Phil's brow and frowned. The fever was getting worse. They were running out of time.

As night fell outside, Clint took the cell phone he'd stolen from Cross's guard and slipped silently out of the storeroom. He dialed the number for the SHIELD emergency dead drop and waited through the requisite three rings. An extraction would be risky, but, if there was a quinjet or chopper anywhere in the region, it was Phil's best chance.

The line rang a fourth time, and Clint frowned. A fifth ring sounded, followed by a sixth, and he knew something was wrong. The seventh ring cut off mid-tone, replaced by a voice Clint wished he didn’t know.

" _I was wondering when you'd try calling for help._ "

Clint's stomach dropped. "Cross."

" _Barton. Good to hear from you._ "

"Aw, don't tell me you miss me already." His heart pounded. SHIELD’s emergency protocols were inviolate, more secure than most state secrets, but here was William fucking Cross chatting casually over a line only SHIELD agents were supposed to know even existed.

“ _Y’know, I almost do. Been awhile since I really enjoyed beating the shit out of somebody._ ”

"Yeah, I'm not really into that kind of thing." Clint looked out through a gap in the window cover. Traffic in the street was light, but there were plenty of places for Cross's goons to be hiding.

"Yeah? What about your friend, there? You think he'll be into it when I start making him cut off his own fingers?"

He pushed down a shudder, pushed down the rise of bile, and said flatly, "He's dead."

There was a brief, chilling pause. " _Is that a fact?_ "

“It’s a fact. It’s just me now, you son of a bitch. So come and fucking get me.”

Clint turned off the phone, took it apart, and crushed each piece under his heel.

Time for a new option.

He went out the back door, the switchblade and gun in his pockets, and walked half a block to find a suitable car. It was a beat-up sedan, in a color and model that hadn't been common in the US since the 1980s, and he used the knife to force the lock. He gave the street a quick scan, looking for anyone who might be paying him a little too much attention, and slid into the driver's seat. It took longer than he would have liked to hotwire the car, but, right at that moment, anything short of instant teleportation was too slow for him.

He didn't think about objectives and timeframes and possible scenarios. There was no mission, not anymore. There was just one foot in front of the other and the absolute imperative to keep them both alive.

With the car running in the narrow alley behind the shop, Clint went back into the storeroom to find Phil propped up on one elbow, looking around in a daze.

“What’s...?”

“Time to go.” He crouched down, slipping Phil’s arm around his neck. “It’s gonna be alright, we just gotta get moving.”

Even through his clothes, Clint could feel the heat in Phil’s skin. They had time before the real danger set in, and Cross thinking Phil was dead might buy them a little more. The clock in Clint’s head just kept ticking down.

Clint lifted, and Phil gasped as the movement jarred his knee. His fingers twisted in the folds of Clint’s shirt, and Clint didn’t think about a little box under the nightstand at home as he carried Phil through the abandoned shop and out to the waiting car.

He’d made a good circuit of the area on his way back after the morning’s chase, to be sure he wasn’t followed, and the nearest hospital was fixed in his memory. He didn’t speed, stopped at every light, and kept his hands at ten and two as his heart pounded and Phil shifted restlessly in the back seat; he wasn’t about to let them get fucked by a goddamn traffic cop.

The hospital was a great brick building with painted trim that was leached of color in the dark. For lack of better direction, Clint parked on the curb and pulled Phil carefully out of the back.

Phil blinked blearily, and, through the fever haze, their location registered. “What are you doing?” he murmured. “What... No. You can’t. Clint, no.”

He pushed at Clint’s chest hard enough that Clint nearly dropped him, but Clint held on tighter and stormed through the hospital doors, calling for help.

Under the sudden frenzy of attention, Clint went into autopilot. He begged the security guards, pleaded with the nurses, and tried, in his minimal Spanish, to communicate what was wrong and what he needed as they buzzed around him. He didn't stop talking or moving until he was directed to an empty bed in a long room. Phil tried to sit back up the moment Clint laid him down, and Clint had to push him back into the bed.

"Have to go," Phil kept saying. "You have to go."

"I'm sorry. It's okay," Clint soothed. "You're gonna be okay."

Then there were doctors with needles and glass vials, and Clint was shuffled aside to pace and hover at the foot of the bed. Phil’s weak flailing subsided, and his voice drifted away, leaving Clint in silence amid the cacophony of meaningless noises and words he didn’t understand.

It seemed like too long and somehow not long enough before a woman in a white coat turned to him, speaking in brusque, tired Spanish.

Clint shook his head. "English?"

The doctor sighed. "You shoot him?"

"What? No!" Clint glanced at Phil, unmoving against the white sheets. "No, I didn't... He's okay, right?"

"Okay, yes. With medicine." She fixed Clint with a suspicious glare. "I get medicine. You pay?"

"Um..."

She sighed again. "I get medicine. He wake up, you leave, yes?"

"Yes. Yeah, sure," Clint assured her. "Soon as he's up, we're gone."

Her expression told him just how much stock she put in that promise, but she strode away and returned with a small bag of pills, which she shoved into Clint’s hand with clipped instructions to give Phil one every day until they were gone. Clint nodded and tried to give her a grateful smile, but she was already turning away, grumbling.

He looked back to Phil, so still and so battered on the narrow bed, and the last ounce of his energy drained out of him in one, heavy breath. The wound had been splinted and rebandaged, wrapped in clean strips of white, and a thin tube ran from a needle in Phil's arm up to a bag of clear liquid. It was a half-ass job, but Clint couldn't blame them; a dirty white boy with a gunshot wound probably wasn't someone they wanted to stick around.

Clint sank wearily onto the edge of the bed. They still had a long way to go, still had to get out of the country, contact SHIELD, take down Cross, figure out...

He scrubbed his hands over his face and didn't think about blood-spattered rooms and the press of a gun barrel beneath his eye.

_There's only so fucking much I can take._

He woke suddenly to a hand on his shoulder and nearly broke the arm of whoever was touching him.

“Señor?”

Clint stood up so fast his head spun, reaching for the knife in his pocket, ready to fight. Shouldn’t have fallen asleep. Shouldn’t have let his guard down.

The two police officers stepped back in alarm, and one of them laid a hand on his gun. The other said something in Spanish, speaking slowly and calmly, like he thought Clint might be stupid or dangerous. Probably both.

Clint shook his head. “I don’t... English? Inglés? Sorry.” His heart pounded. Cops meant someone had made a call, and Clint would bet his left arm that call had been intercepted, overheard, or otherwise reported in Cross’s camp. Fuck.

“Need to talk with you. Please come,” the cop said. He sounded relaxed, but Clint had been cornered by enough cops to know how fast that could change.

“We can talk here,” Clint replied, jerking his head toward Phil. “I’m not leaving him.”

The cop’s stare darted to Phil and back to Clint. “You shoot him?”

“Why does... No, I didn’t shoot him.” Clint sighed. “It was an accident. We were camping. He was showing me the gun, and it went off. Stupid accident.”

The two men exchanged a look. Clint glanced down to see if the hospital bed had wheels and wondered how far they could get if he just pushed it.

“You have gun?” the second cop asked.

Clint shook his head and moved a fraction of an inch away from the bed. If he had to take these guys down, he wanted some space to move. “Left it at the campsite.”

The first cop raised an eyebrow. “You steal car?”

Right. The stolen car. “Yeah. Look, it was an emergency. He was... We needed a car, so I stole it.” Clint put on the most pitiful expression he could manage, one not too far from how he actually felt. “If you’re gonna arrest me, can you at least wait until he wakes up? I don’t wanna just take off.”

They looked at each other again, then the first cop pulled a notepad out of his pocket and asked, “Name?”

Clint gave them an alias in California with enough documentation to hold up under scrutiny, address and place of employment included, and a matching identity for Phil. He lied easy as breathing and offered answers and excuses to all of the questions about who they were and why they were there. If anyone had asked him later, in another context, to repeat the story he told then, Clint would have been at a loss.

They left with a warning that security would be keeping an eye on him and that they would be back if the car’s owner wanted to press charges. Clint let his relief show and smiled weakly. The moment the door closed behind them, he was in motion.

He found an unused wheelchair in a far corner and wheeled it back, hooking the IV stand to the chair so that it would roll along beside it. Carefully, he bent to lift Phil into his arms. Even unconscious, Phil’s brow was furrowed and tense, but he gave no sign of waking as Clint settled him gently into the chair. The injured leg jutted out in front, supported by the foot rest, and Clint felt a sudden stab of paranoia that he was going to run into something and make everything worse.

The lights in the long room had been lowered as the night went on, and most of the patients were sleeping fitfully in their narrow beds. A few were awake, sitting up to watch Clint curiously. He caught the eye of a skinny boy regarding him with a serious, dark stare. Clint put a finger to his lips, and the boy nodded.

Checking that the coast was clear, Clint wheeled Phil into the hallway. There was a light flurry of nighttime activity, and no one spared them much attention as Clint turned away from the exit and toward the elevator at the end of the hall.

Phil’s head lolled on the back of the chair and brushed against the edge of Clint’s hand. Clint resisted the impulse to reach out and smooth down Phil’s hair, to steady him in the chair, or to otherwise touch and reassure himself.

He found a small, vacant room on the fifth floor and settled Phil gently into the empty bed, arranging the sheets and adding a few extraneous bandages so that they would obscure Phil’s face from casual glances. He put the pills the doctor had given him in the breast pocket of Phil’s tattered shirt and hoped their purpose would be clear enough.

There was no pen or paper to leave a note and no chance of waking him to say... Not goodbye. Never goodbye.

Clint bent over the bed and let his thumb drag lightly around the curve of Phil’s ear.

“I’m coming back,” he said. “I swear I’ll come back. Just hold tight.”

There was no answer but soft and steady breathing, and Clint left a kiss on Phil’s brow to serve as the punctuation to his promise. He turned the lock on the door as he left.

Everything they had done had been a temporary measure, acting and reacting just to keep moving and stay alive. Not anymore. This time, Clint knew Cross would be coming for them; this time, he would be ready.

***

If Phil had dreams, he didn’t remember them, but he woke slowly with the hollow sense of having lost something.

If he kept his eyes closed, he could almost believe that he was home, in bed in his apartment. His whole body felt bruised and sore, but that was normal, after a rough mission. There was a smell of hospital linen and antiseptic, the kind of thing that lingered when he’d spent a while in medical. If he kept his eyes closed, if he didn’t think about it, he could imagine stretching, reaching out just a little, and feeling Clint in the bed beside him, close and warm and murmuring in his sleep.

_Clint._

Phil cracked his eyes open and was met with the featureless expanse of a tiled ceiling in a dark room. His head ached; his mouth was dry and stale. The ghost of pain throbbed in his knee, and he closed his eyes again.

_Dammit, Clint._

The room was silent, nothing but the ambient sounds of the city outside and the whispering rattle of industrial air conditioning. He turned his head slowly, his neck stiff and aching, and looked to one side and the other; he was alone. The sense of loss that lingered from his unremembered dreams seemed to expand into the empty space around him, soaking the air in a grim shadow of foreboding.

Phil opened his mouth to form a sentence, a question, a name, but the sound cracked like baked earth in his throat. He swallowed and tried again.

“Clint?”

No answer, though it was only the half-awake longing in his heart that expected one.

“Hello?”

The deep quiet was all that echoed back, and the sulfurous fog of sleep that hung in his brain thinned suddenly with a jolt of fear. He struggled to sit up, fighting down the wave of nausea that came as he moved. The room spun around him, still silent, still empty.

There was an impulse to call out again, to keep shouting for Clint until he answered, but noise was more likely to draw unwanted attention than the reply he hoped for.

His leg had been splinted and bandaged and felt considerably more like a limb than the mire of fevered agony he last remembered, even though a dull ache persisted. He found a wheelchair parked beside the bed and a small bag of pills in his pocket, signs that he had been left here with care and that whoever had brought him, presumably Clint, had not expected to return quickly.

Phil scrubbed his hands over his face, feeling the texture of strange bandages on his nose and brow. So that anyone who glanced in the room wouldn’t recognize him at first, he realized, because Clint thought of everything.

“God _dammit_.”

He pulled the IV out of his arm and inched toward the edge of the bed, muttering to himself as he pulled the wheelchair closer.

“Stupid fucking son of a bitch. Dump me here and then run off t-” He stopped.

Leaving Phil in the relative safety of an anonymous hospital room and striking out on his own for help would have been the best in a set of bad options, and Phil had to wonder if Clint had chosen to do the smart thing for once in his life.

He gave that possibility a full second of serious consideration before he shook his head and eased his legs carefully over the side of the bed. He would have bet all his accumulated vacation days that Clint was somewhere in the hospital and in the process of doing something dangerous.

Getting himself out of the flimsy bed and into the wheelchair was a less than dignified process, but he made it, breathing hard and trying desperately not to throw up as he settled into the seat.

In the hallway outside, there was no activity aside from a single nurse making her rounds, shoes squeaking faintly on the tile floor. Phil waited until she disappeared into another room, then wheeled himself quickly down the hall, searching for the elevators. It might have been smarter to stay put, to wait in the quiet room until the danger of discovery had passed, but Phil, in all honesty, was no more inclined to do the smart thing than Clint was. He pressed the elevator button and hoped it would arrive quickly.

The ground floor was as subdued as hospital lobbies ever were, and, at first, Phil didn’t notice the woman standing guard at the entrance. She was in plain clothes, leaning against the wall near the doors and sweeping her eyes casually across the open space around her. When she turned her head, Phil noticed a small device looped over her ear. Then he caught sight of her face and froze. It was Cross’s lieutenant, Conrad, the one who had offered machetes as the means of Clint’s execution.

Keeping his own face angled away, Phil wheeled slowly in a different direction.

His heart pounded out an unsteady rhythm. There were sure to be more of Cross’s people prowling the hospital. Had they found Clint? Were they closing in on him? Where was Cross?

Phil paused in the shelter of a small alcove and closed his eyes. Exhaustion and dizziness made his vision swim, and he was still weak from the banished fever and lingering pain. If he was caught out now, helpless and unarmed, he’d be finished. Even as every waking inch of him wanted to go tearing through the hospital to look for Clint, the first thing he needed to do was come up with a plan.

The sudden, earsplitting sound of alarm bells made him jump hard enough to jar his leg, and his knee began to throb as chaos erupted around him.

Hospital staff rushed past, shouting to each other in confusion and trying to herd startled patients and visitors gently toward the exits. A cool voice delivered a recorded message over the loudspeakers, instructing everyone to remain calm and follow the posted evacuation routes. From the corner of his eye, Phil saw Conrad pacing across the lobby, scowling and talking into a handheld radio.

The interruption was too convenient to signal a drill or an actual fire, and Phil imagined Clint pulling the alarm with a certain amount of glee. In spite of himself, Phil smiled.

With the crowd as cover, he wheeled his way toward a short side hall, looking for a place to hide. He was jimmying open the cheap lock on a supply closet when the alarm abruptly stopped.

The people heading for the exits paused, milling uncertainly and murmuring to each other, and a creeping sense of foreboding crept up Phil’s spine. He kept his attention on the lock, working as fast as he could, breathing deep to steady his shaking hands.

The locked clicked, and Phil pulled the door open. There was room enough inside, but it would be too difficult to maneuver with the wheelchair. He prepared to pull himself out of the chair and into the closet as the loudspeakers in the hallway came on with a low hum.

The murmuring of the crowd fell, listening. Then the sound started.

It sliced into Phil’s head like a hot knife, a line of barbed wire running between his temples. He jerked himself forward, falling to the closet floor, and slammed the door shut behind him. The pain that shot through his knee as he hit the ground was nothing next to the burning, searing destruction in his brain.

He tried to cover his ears, tried to scream and drown out the sound, but it was inside his head, boring into the backs of his eyes. He tried to fight, to think, but the only conscious thought that would come was, _Not again. God, please, not again._


	5. Chapter 5

Clint abandoned his filthy clothes for a set of hospital scrubs, and somewhere in the back of his mind there was a dirty joke about playing doctor. He wanted to make it, but there wasn't much point without Phil there rolling his eyes and pretending not to smile.

When they got back...

Clint shook his head. Impending danger first. Personal drama later.

He filled his pockets with scalpels, bandages, and anything else he could scavenge that might be useful. No sign of trouble, so far. He found himself ranging back toward the fifth floor, back toward Phil, and he thought there might be time enough to pause and check in. It would only take a second to stick his head in the room and make sure everything was as he’d left it and that Phil wasn’t awake and freaking out.

Not that Phil Coulson, Professional Badass, could ever just freak out like a normal person. No, his reaction to fear and uncertainty was to grab the biggest gun he could find and run straight at the problem.

Clint sighed and hoped that whatever they’d given him would keep Phil under for a little while yet.

Before Clint could make it to the stairwell, a man emerged from the elevator. He was in ordinary clothes, no obvious weapons, and he moved down the hallway slowly and with purpose, peering into rooms through the windows in the doors, crisscrossing the hall like he was spinning a web.

Clint didn’t falter, didn’t pause, and the man kept up his survey of the rooms as Clint moved steadily toward him. He barely glanced at Clint until they were nearly on top of each other. He gave a brief nod as they passed, then looked again as Clint stepped in close. Recognition flashed across his face, followed by the realization that he was fucked.

He moved back, but not fast enough. Clint kicked his knee sideways and caught him as he fell, bracing a forearm against his throat. The man struggled and clawed at Clint’s arm, but Clint held tight, counting down the seconds as the man's pulse and breathing slowed.

Clint dragged the unconscious body into a nearby room and left him bound in a corner with a strip of bandage. One of the room's inhabitants, a woman with a cast on her leg, blinked at him in sleepy confusion as he rifled through the man's pockets, claiming a gun and a radio for his own. Clint flashed her a bright grin and pointed at the man.

"Bad guy," he said. She just kept staring at him until he left.

The guy would wake up before too long, and the woman would probably call for help. By the time Cross and his minions knew which way was up, though, Clint would already be ten steps ahead.

He ran across two more of Cross’s goons on the third floor, and one of them managed to shout an alarm into her radio before Clint put her on the ground. A flurry of confusion crackled over the radio until Clint switched it off. An orderly stopped short at the sight of Clint standing over the two unconscious figures, then went running in the opposite direction.

Both these two and the one before had small devices looped over their ears. They looked like comms, but then why use radios? Clint shrugged and stuffed the things in his pockets as he tied the two of them up in a bathroom stall. He emptied both guns of ammo and threw them into a trash can.

Once the minions were secure, he headed back down the hallway and switched on the radio, listening as his pursuers talked over each other.

“ _...sure it’s him?_ ”

“ _...anyone have eyes on..._ ”

“ _Where did that come..._ ”

“ _...the hell is going on?_ ”

Clint smiled and spoke into the receiver. “Hard to find good help, isn’t it, Billy boy?”

There was a beat of silence, then Cross’s voice came on. “ _Barton, you little shit. I’m gonna_ end _you._ ”

Standing on a chair, Clint pushed open one of the ceiling vents and pulled himself carefully up into the cooling ducts. “You mean you’re not having fun? I’m having a blast.”

“ _Yeah, I bet you are. All your friends dead. Now you’re running around playing hide-and-seek._ ”

Clint had counted less than a dozen voices, all speaking English. Most of them would be combing the hallways, searching for him, while Cross waited in some central location on the ground floor. Taking them out one at a time might work for a while, but they’d catch up sooner or later. Probably sooner.

“What can I say. I’m easily entertained.” His voice echoed in the small space, hopefully not enough for Cross to pick up on. “You guys are really bad at this game, by the way.”

Cross laughed. “ _Jesus Christ, I’m gonna enjoy hurting you. I’m gonna make you beg me to kill you._ ”

“Cool it there, big guy, I’m not that kinda boy.” With the radio clipped to his collar, Clint shifted the vent back into place and maneuvered carefully to pull himself into the connecting vertical duct. The duct was barely wide enough for his shoulders, and the sides buckled ominously around him. He maneuvered his arms over his head, braced his hands, and slowly started to climb.

“ _You will be by the time I’m done with you,_ ” Cross snarled. Clint pictured him pacing; he seemed the type to pace.

The next vent was in the ceiling of the floor above, and Clint hauled himself over it, peering down through the narrow slits into the quiet hall. No one passed below, but that didn’t mean anything. “Gotta catch me first, asshole.”

With the stolen gun in hand, he dove headfirst through the vent.

One minion down the hall to the left, another closer on the right, no civilians. Clint hit the floor in a crouch, breathed in, raised the gun.

One shot to the right, clean through the shoulder. Two shots to the left, both shoulders. Back to the right, shoulder, knee.

Pause. Breathe.

Clint exhaled slowly as he stood, the radio squawking in his ear. The nearest goon had dropped her gun, and she gave Clint a murderous look, twisted with pain, as he scooped it up. He offered an apologetic shrug in reply.

The second assailant had fallen backward and lay on the floor groaning. He barely twitched as Clint took the gun from his limp fingers.

“Fourth floor! He’s on the fourth floor, south wing!” The first minion had gotten to her radio and was shouting into it.

Doors were opening along the hall, people drawn out by the sound of gunfire. Someone screamed.

“Y’know what, Cross? I’m tired of hide and seek.” Clint pulled the lever on the fire alarm, and the sound of shrill bells pierced the air. “Let’s play something else.”

He threw the radio to the floor and ran.

There was a small waiting room around the corner, dark and empty, and Clint ducked into it as the sounds of people milling began to swell beneath the alarm. Out of sight, he leaned against the wall, waiting, giving himself a moment to breathe. Right then, the wooden chairs lined up next to him looked as inviting as a feather bed, but, if he sat down, Clint wasn’t sure he’d be able to make himself get back up.

His birthday was coming soon. Maybe he could fake a cold and spend the day in bed. Maybe he could convince Phil to call in, too, and they could order take-out and watch TV. Maybe they could just make it out of this nightmare alive and whole, and Clint would never ask for anything ever again.

In the hallway, patients and staff crowded in organized chaos toward the stairwells, and Clint slipped out to join the exodus, disappearing into the flow without drawing so much as a glance.

Cross would be on the ground floor, somewhere central, near a main door, someplace he could manage his people and still have an easy exit in case things got rough. Clint just had to find him, get through a handful of heavily armed minions, bluff and/or shoot his way out with Cross in tow, get Phil, and escape the country without causing an international incident or dying.

No big deal.

He was on the third floor landing when the alarm abruptly cut off. The crowd around him slowed and stopped, uncertain. There was just enough time for the bad feeling in Clint’s stomach to begin swelling into panic. Then the loudspeaker clicked on.

***

The sound pulsed and dropped to a thin ringing, and Phil was caught lying on the floor of the dark closet. His whole body was tense and shaking, like a cord pulled right to the point of breaking, and the only things in his head were pain and _not again_.

Through the closet door, he could hear the muffled sounds of people in terror as they found themselves mysteriously immobile and trapped. There was a lull as the loudspeaker gave a loud crackle, and an eerie, monotone voice asked, in Spanish, that everyone please remain calm and stand by for an additional announcement.

Phil’s heart pounded in his throat, and he knew, even before the next voice began, what he would hear.

“ _Sorry for the inconvenience, folks, I just need a moment of your time to address a dangerous fugitive using your poor little hospital as a hideout._ ”

Cross’s voice was tinny and quiet through the door, but Phil didn’t need to hear clearly to understand what was happening, what was going to happen.

“ _Barton. These people don’t know what this is, but you do. And you know what I can do with it. You have two minutes to surrender._ ”

A sharp tone sounded, and all of Phil’s clenched muscles released at once. He sprawled on the floor, knocking his head against a shelf, and fought to steady his desperate breathing. Outside, the people erupted into full-blown panic. He couldn’t blame them; the immobility was terrifying enough on its own, and translations of Cross’s threats would be circulating quickly.

Another kind of panic clawed at the back of Phil’s raw throat, but he wouldn’t let it take hold. Clint could take care of himself. On a good day, Clint could have taken down Cross and his thugs in his sleep, and a bad day just meant he might break a sweat doing it.

Phil forced himself to sit up, struggling to think through the dizziness. Priority one, whatever else he wanted it to be, was to keep… _that_ from happening again, which meant taking out the PA system, a task that could not, unfortunately, be accomplished from the floor of a supply closet.

Standing took more effort than he thought he could handle and left his head light and spinning. Flipping on the closet light, he found a discarded crutch and hobbled carefully into the chaotic hallway. His wheelchair was nowhere to be seen, but walking would be faster, even in his current state.

In the confusion, there was no real flow of traffic, and Phil stayed close to the wall, moving quickly and carefully and not allowing himself to look over his shoulder to where Conrad had been, where Clint might be.

Instead, he ran through possible scenarios and zeroed his thoughts in on priority two: escape.

***

The doors were barred, and the terrified bystanders trapped inside crowded against the walls of the lobby, leaving Cross and three of his minions like islands in a wide sea of empty space. Aside from a low, tense whispering and the crackle of radios, it was silent.

Clint came out of the stairwell and shouldered through a knot of people. Once clear, he strode toward Cross, spreading his arms and calling out, “Nineteen seconds to spare, asshole.”

The minions raised their guns, and Clint slowed, showing them his empty hands. “Do I have to actually say ‘I surrender’? ‘Cause that seems kind of silly.”

Cross gave him a cold smile that twisted the skin around his false eye. “Say ‘uncle’.”

“Uncle.”

“Good boy,” Cross said. “Now get on your knees.”

Clint’s heart pounded like it was trying to escape from his chest before he did something stupid, but he held Cross’s eye as he sank to his knees. All three gun sights followed him down. “You’re not gonna kill me right here, are you? Don’t wanna traumatize the kids.”

“Y’know, I really wish I could,” Cross said. One minion held a gun to Clint’s head while another patted him down, pulling the meager supplies out of his pockets. “I mean, I’m not a violent man. I do what I have to in a violent business, but I don’t enjoy it.” He crouched down so that his face was level with Clint’s. “You, though. I want to kill you so bad, I can _taste_ it.”

“Ew.”

The minion searching Clint caught his finger on a scalpel blade and jerked back with a yelp. Clint snickered, and the other thug drew back to hit him with the butt of her gun.

“Stop,” Cross commanded, and the minion froze. To Clint, he said, “As much as I’d love to put you out of your misery, I have orders to bring you in alive and unharmed.” The last word was directed upward at the thug, who went back to placidly pointing the gun at Clint’s head.

“Did you tell your bosses what a nice guy I am?” In Clint’s experience, _alive and unharmed_ never turned out as good as it sounded.

“I told them you’d be a lot nicer with a bullet in your brain,” Cross grumbled. “One clean shot would make about forty percent of my problems go away.”

Clint gave him a look. “Come on, now. You’re smart enough to know most shots cause more problems than they solve. No such thing as a clean kill.”

“No, I guess you’re right about that."

Before Clint could come up with a witty riposte, the lights in the hospital flickered once and went out with a deep, chilling hum. In the beat of heavy silence that followed, Clint’s heart jumped into his throat.

_Phil._

“Son of a bitch,” Cross spat, just as screaming started among the already panicked bystanders.

The man behind Clint pulled down his hands and forced him to his feet. Clint went easily, the very picture of cooperation, and let his hands hang limp in the man’s grip, slipping two fingers under the waistband of his scrubs for the one scalpel he’d known they would miss.

Cross grabbed Clint by the collar and got into his face. “Is this your little boyfriend? The _dead_ one?”

Clint smiled. “Maybe’s it’s a bad circuit.”

The hospital generators kicked in, and emergency lights came on in the corners of the broad lobby. The two minions waved their guns menacingly at the cowering clusters of people, and the third tightened his grip on Clint’s arms. Carefully, Clint palmed the scalpel and squared his feet, loose and relaxed.

Cross scowled and stepped back, pulling a radio out of his pocket. Into the receiver, he snapped, “Barton’s secure. Find Coulson and shoot him in his other leg.”

“What happened to alive and unharmed?” Clint asked.

“Well, _relatively_ unharmed.” Cross gave him a poisonous smile. “Of course, a crippled SHIELD agent isn’t much use to anybody. So maybe you’ll get lucky, and they’ll just let us kill him.”

Clint grinned. “Y’know what?”

“What?”

He leaned in close and said right into Cross’s face, “Just for that, I’m taking the other eye.”

Cross scowled, and Clint twisted as he dropped to one knee. The scalpel blade sliced through the hand of the man holding him, and he swung it around to catch the back of Cross’s knee. He stood and cut a clean arc over the man’s throat, then spun and grabbed Cross in a tight hold, bringing the blade up to his neck.

The other two minions barely had time to get their guns around, and they had no clean shot without risking their boss. Into Cross’s ear, Clint growled, “Tell them to drop the guns.”

“Fuck you,” Cross spat, and Clint pressed the scalpel against his skin, just enough to draw blood. Cross hissed, but he didn’t give in. “What are you gonna do? If you kill me, you’re still screwed. You’ve got nowhere to go, no back-up, and no way out.”

“So you think I’m just gonna lay down and roll over?” Clint took a cautious step back, pulling Cross with him. The minions matched his movement. “You think you can just drop me on your masters’ doormat like a good dog?”

“Well, I’d hoped it would be in a body bag.”

“Aw, but that wasn’t the plan was it?” Clint kept inching back, and the two minions kept moving with him. “See, I think you had one job. You just had to stop SHIELD from getting one person out of the country. Why? Because she knew something? State secrets? Dirty laundry?”

Cross huffed. “Doesn’t matter, now. She’s dead. Oh, and so are your friends. Or most of them, anyway.”

Clint froze. “ _Most_ of them?”

There was a blur of movement in the corner of his eye, and he dragged Cross out of the way as an ambulance hopped the curb and came crashing through the glass front of the building.

The bystanders shrieked, and Cross’s thugs fired wildly at the front of the ambulance. Clint pushed Cross down behind an overturned bench as the passenger side door swung open, and he looked up to see Phil leaning across the cab as bullets shattered the windshield above him.

Phil met his eye, and all Clint’s doubt and terror splintered on the sudden surge of unbelievable, unbreakable hope.

Phil gestured at him impatiently. “ _Well?_ ”

Clint grinned and dove for the door, dragging Cross along with him.

***

“When we get home,” Clint said. “We’re taking a solid week off. Fury can go fuck himself.”

Phil kept his eyes on the road and ran a red light, swerving through the intersection. “I may not have a choice about that.”

He used his left foot on the pedals, his injured leg angled to the side. The motion of the racing ambulance wrenched his knee, and he fought to focus through the pain, zeroing in on the lights and lines of the road, keeping his hands locked tight on the steering wheel. He didn’t see the stricken look Clint gave him, but he felt it.

He did catch Cross rolling his eyes from where he sat bound on the floorboard. “God, I should have just killed you.”

“Probably,” Phil agreed.

A few blocks behind them, the sound of sirens grew louder. In the mirror, a swarm of lights came into view.

Clint turned backward and leaned out the window, gripping a gun he’d taken off Cross.

“Six cars,” he reported. “Four cops, two SUVs. I can take them out, but…”

Phil risked a glance, and saw Clint’s face, the lines in his brow deep under the flashing streetlights. “But?”

“Too much traffic. They spin out, civilians go down with them.”

“Dammit.” He jerked hard and took the turn wide across three lanes. The late-night traffic left room to maneuver, but there were more than enough cars to hit.

“I don’t guess your plan went any further than _run_?” Clint asked.

Phil made another sharp turn, and there was a scream of tires and a crash as one of the police cars skidded sideways into a corner building. “Run fast?”

“There’s nowhere you _can_ run, you idiots,” Cross growled. “Even if you get away, you don’t escape. There’s nowhere they can’t get to you.”

There was no room for anymore fear and dread, but something icy spiked through Phil’s gut. He shook his head and said to Clint, “I suppose gagging him would be too much to ask.”

“I dunno. Do we have any kitchen scissors?” Clint replied acidly.

Gunfire clattered against the back of the ambulance, and a bullet shattered the driver’s side mirror.

“Fuck!” Clint ducked back into the cab, still gripping the unfired gun.

Phil’s mind raced, chasing after any solution, any option, but he couldn’t think past the bright lights blurring by and the work of keeping the careening ambulance on a steady path.

“If we don’t…” He glanced down. The needle on the gas gauge hovered just under a quarter of a tank. Just enough rope to hang themselves. “Clint, if this doesn’t…”

“Don’t even fucking start,” Clint snapped. He paused, and Phil caught his glance from the corner of his eye.

Another burst of gunfire pummeled the back of the ambulance with enough force to make the wheel shudder in Phil’s hands. Clint dropped toward the floorboards and started rummaging in Cross’s pockets.

Cross kicked uselessly at him, squirming away. “What the fuck are you doing? Get your fucking hands off me!”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, shut up!” Clint sat up holding Cross’s phone, dialing rapidly. He flinched away from the shattering glass as another bullet took out the mirror beside him.

Phil glanced at him in confusion. “Who in the world are you calling?”

“Possibly somebody dead,” Clint said, pressing the phone to his ear. Phil couldn’t hear the other end of the call, but he heard Clint’s sharp breath as someone answered. “Christ in a can, Sitwell, your voice is music to my fucking ears.”

Something slammed into the ambulance from behind, sending it skidding wildly across the road. Phil’s palms burned as the wheel spun in his grip, his knuckles bone white, and he wrestled to keep the ambulance on the road, swerving through oncoming traffic and back into a clear lane.

“Listen, we’re in serious vat of shit,” Clint was saying. “If there’s any friendlies in th-… Wait, what do you mean you’re already here?”

One of the pursuing SUV’s pulled up alongside the ambulance, and Phil caught a glimpse of a man in the passenger seat readying a large gun to fire. With a punch to the accelerator, the ambulance picked up speed, and Phil jerked the wheel hard, ramming the front corner of the SUV and sending it veering into the opposing lane.

Without looking, he reached over and took the gun from Clint’s hand just as Clint said in disbelief, “You did _what_?”

The SUV screeched back across traffic and sideswiped the ambulance. The impact sent Phil swaying and wrenched his knee. He gritted his teeth and held tight to the wheel with one hand and the gun with the other. With the ambulance steady, he aimed through the window of the SUV and fired. It took five shots, but the fifth bullet caught the passenger in the face. The driver slammed on the brakes, and the SUV dropped away behind them.

“We need to find a straight stretch of road,” Clint said.

“What? Why?”

“Apparently, they stole a helicopter.”

Phil made a left turn hard enough to tilt the ambulance on two wheels, and tires squealed after them. “Who is _they_?”

The on-ramp to the highway was six blocks ahead, and Phil took them at a breakneck pace, zooming onto the long, straight road at the upper limit of the ambulance’s speed. One of the cop cars caught up and clipped the back of the ambulance, sending them skidding against the guard rail.

“Okay,” Phil said. “Now what?”

Through the rush of wind and the hum of speeding cars came the familiar, unmistakable thumping of helicopter blades. A bright grin broke across Clint’s face. “Now, the daring rescue.”

There was more room to move on the highway, and the police cruisers drew up on either side, boxing them in. Clint pulled the gun from Phil’s hand and promptly shot out two tires on one of them.

“Keep it steady,” he said, leaning across Phil to take aim at the other car.

Phil adjusted his hold so that he could reach around Clint’s body to the steering wheel. He could feel the warm rhythm of Clint’s deep, even breathing.

“Two seconds.” Clint’s voice was flat and calm.

An impact rocked the ambulance as one of their pursuers slammed into the back, and Phil held fast to both the wheel and Clint as it shook and shuddered around them.

“I’ve got you. I’ve got you,” Phil said, keeping an arm around Clint’s waist as he steadied himself in the window.

Two shots and the second cruiser peeled off, fishtailing into the scattered oncoming traffic, tire rims throwing sparks on the asphalt.

Clint pulled himself back into the cab and glared down at Cross. “You know this gun is a piece of shit, right?”

“Well, I would’ve carried something better if I’d known you were gonna take me hostage and rob me.”

Something hit the roof with a heavy thump, and a new storm of gunfire rained around them, this time with answering shots from above. There was movement, and Natasha Romanov appeared in the passenger-side window, red curls whipping in the wind.

“You are my favorite person in the world,” Clint said, and she rolled her eyes.

Tossing a harness into his lap, she said, “Put this on. Thank me later.”

“Cross first,” he replied, and Phil turned to him in disbelief.

“ _What?_ ”

“I’ll explain later,” Clint snapped, already slipping the harness around Cross’s chest. Romanov passed him a tether, and he clipped it in place.

“I hate all of you,” Cross grumbled as Romanov hauled him out the window. She gave a tug on her own cord, and they ascended out of sight.

Another impact from the back, and something came loose in the undercarriage. The ambulance rattled and vibrated like it was shaking apart, and Phil kept a bloodless grip on the steering wheel, fighting just to stay in forward motion.

“Clint.”

“These things take a lot of punishment, don’t they?”

One of the SUVs pulled up beside them, raking gunfire across the cab. Phil ducked down as far as he could, and the ambulance swerved wildly. His injured knee bent and banged hard against the console, and he couldn’t stop from crying out, his head spinning with vertigo and pain.

“Clint!”

Clint fired twice, and the SUV veered off, trailing sparks and burning rubber. A new chorus of sirens wailed behind them, and Clint pulled back from the window, saying, “Yeah, so there’s more cops.”

There was a thump as Romanov returned to the roof. Phil jumped when her face appeared upside down in his window. She tossed in two harnesses and handed the tether across to Clint.

“Faster would be better, boys.”

“Go,” Clint said. “We’re right behind you.”

She vanished, and Phil sat up as Clint reached around him to buckle on the harness. “This thing’s going to go out of control the second I let go.”

Clint glanced up, his jaw tight. “Yeah, I know.” He clipped the tether onto Phil’s harness. “And there’s no time for another trip. Which is why you’re gonna go, and I’m gonna hold the wheel.”

“No.”

“This is not up for discussion.” He scooted into Phil’s seat and took hold of the wheel, and Phil felt his foot edging carefully onto the accelerator. “Go.”

It didn’t process, the meaning of the moment wouldn’t click in Phil’s head. All he could think of was how he would describe it in his mission report, what words he could use to capture the sensation of Clint pressed close beside him in the rattling cab and the feeling that the purpose of his existence was somehow, in that second, slipping away.

“Clint, move.”

Clint pushed him over against the inside of the door, eyes fixed on the road through the spiderweb of cracks in the windshield. “I’m not arguing about this. Phil, please just go.”

“No! Move. I’m not…” Phil blinked. “No, wait, stay there. I have an idea.”

He unhooked the tether and reached through the window, hooking it onto the end of a windshield wiper. Then he pushed open the door.

“When I say the word, hit the brakes hard,” he said, and Clint, rightfully, looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “Just trust me.”

Clint sighed. “Yes, sir.”

Phil peered out the door at the lane behind them. The second SUV was hovering at the back corner of the ambulance, cautious but relentless and accompanied by a pack of police cruisers.

“Get over just a little to the right,” he said, and Clint obediently angled over so that the SUV was square with the ambulance’s side. Phil inched his hand back toward the inside edge of the door. “Ready, and… brakes!”

He snatched his hand inside just as Clint slammed on the brakes, and the momentum sent them both lurching forward against the steering wheel. Phil’s knee felt like something was tearing inside it, and he clung desperately to Clint’s shoulder to steady himself and to keep from falling out as the SUV rushed past and ripped the door off of its hinges.

The second the door was gone, Clint hit the accelerator, and the ambulance zoomed back ahead, leaving a confused cacophony of screeching tires in their wake. Phil took the tether and once again clipped it to his harness, pulling himself carefully up and out of the cab to stand on the running board. The wind tore at him, trying to drag him away, but he gripped the edge of the roof with one shaking hand and reached the other back inside to Clint.

“On the count of three,” he said.

Clint gave him a look caught somewhere between awestruck and furious. Then he nodded and began moving toward the open door, keeping one hand white-knuckled on the wheel and one foot on the accelerator. The other hand, he set in an unshakable grip on Phil’s harness. “One.”

Phil trusted Clint’s hold to keep him in place and moved his own hand from the roof to the line of cord outstretched above him. “Two,” he said.

Clint was angled as far out of the cab as he could without sacrificing the pedal and the wheel. He looked up, and Phil caught his eye. Together, they said, “Three.”

Phil tugged hard on the cord, and Clint jumped, sending them both swinging out and away from the careening ambulance.

Instantly, it slowed and spun out, skidding into the path of the pursuing cars, which broke around it like waves on a rock. Gunshots cracked above the sound of crashing, and bullets sliced through the air around them, close enough that Phil could hear them whistle by.

Their feet dangled uselessly over the chaos below, but Clint’s arms around him were tight and sure. He returned the embrace with all the strength he had left, and, steadily through the night air, they rose.


	6. Epilogue

Operation Evangeline hadn’t been rescue and recon. With the other civilians as cover, the mission’s real purpose was to exfiltrate a source inside the Colombian government who claimed to have crucial intelligence pertaining to SHIELD. Only Sitwell had known the source’s identity, and he confirmed what Clint had already known, that Cross and his thugs had killed her in their assault on the safe house.

Sitwell, Romanov, and two civilians were all that made it out.

“Bringing Cross in means that it wasn’t for nothing,” Phil said. “Whatever the source had, he must know. We just have to get it out of him.”

It would be at least another surgery and two more weeks before Phil would be allowed to go home. Clint, in the meantime, was getting used to sleeping in chairs, and the medical staff gave up trying to chase him out.

“Not sure that’s gonna be as easy as we think.” Clint shook his head. “This whole thing feels off.”

“Yes, it does, but we don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle, yet.”

Clint scowled. “I hate puzzles.”

“I know.” Phil smiled and reached for Clint’s hand. Even after the comfort of safety, sleep, and real food, he was still pale and worn, and somehow smaller than he had been just days before.

“Still feeling run-down?”

Phil’s smile turned wry. “I haven’t seen sunlight in a week, I can’t feel most of my right leg, and I’m on enough antibiotics to wipe out entire species of bacteria. So, no, I’m not really in fighting form just yet.”

Clint rolled his eyes and heaved a dramatic sigh. “Well, don’t be such a baby about it.” Still holding onto his hand, Phil punched him lightly in the arm, and Clint grinned. “Listen, I, uh… I know we kinda talked about it before, but… Well, you were sorta dying, so I don’t really know if that counts, but…”

He’d had a plan, but Clint’s plans usually never lasted past Step One and usually devolved pretty quickly into Shoot Something, which wasn’t really helpful in this instance. This time, at least, he had the ring.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the little box that had been hidden under the nightstand and handed it awkwardly over to Phil, who stared back at him blankly.

“Oh. Oh, wow. Do you even remember any of that conversation? You were delirious and talking about, like, insurance and posthumous…?” Clint trailed off as Phil shook his head, looking momentarily panicked.

“Did I… I didn’t say anything… I mean, you’d tell me if…” Phil stopped. “No. No, wait. If I said something embarrassing, I don’t want to know.”

Clint laughed. “Embarrassingly sappy, maybe.”

The tips of Phil’s ears turned pink, and he looked down at the box in his hand. “So what’s this that I don’t remember kind of talking about?”

Trying to swallow around the sudden beating of his heart in his throat, Clint said lightly, “Open it.”

With a curious frown, Phil levered the top off the box with his thumb and went absolutely still when he saw the simple steel ring inside.

“Clint…”

“I know this isn’t really romantic,” Clint said quickly. “And I know, after everything that’s happened, maybe it’s not even a good idea. And if you don’t think it’s a good idea or you don’t want to then that’s fine. It’s not… I mean, it’s not like it’s not a big deal, but I’m not gonna be mad or anything if you say no. It’s just… Well, this is what I want, and I really really hope you want it, too.”

Phil looked from the ring to Clint, his face white and stunned. “Are you serious?”

“…Yes?” Clint could feel his palms sweating, and Phil was still holding his hand.

Calmly, coolly, Phil said, “Just so we’re absolutely clear, with no possibility for misunderstanding or miscommunication, the question you are symbolically posing is whether I want to marry you.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s what it means when you’re crazy about somebody and you give them a ring,” Clint said, suddenly nervous. “I mean, am I supposed to… I thought it was understood, but do I have to, like, get on one knee and ask the question, or something?”

“No, I think… I think, as long as we’re both clear on what’s happening, you don’t have to spell it out.” Phil looked back down at the ring, staring as if he thought it might vanish.

“So…?”

He blinked up at Clint. “What?”

It wasn’t just his palms, now; a cold sweat had broken out all over Clint’s skin. “Okay, I was feeling really confident about this, and now I’m really not.”

“Oh.” Phil’s eyes widened. “Oh! Right. Of course. Sorry.” He fumbled one-handed with the box and somehow managed to maneuver the ring into place on the third finger of his left hand.

For all his planning and forethought and idle daydreaming, Clint had been entirely unprepared for the moment itself, for the sight of his ring on Phil’s hand and all the promises encircled in it. His heart felt like it might leave him entirely, beating so hard that his bones rattled and his insides ached.

“So, uh…” Clint cleared his throat, and he definitely was not crying, not even a little bit. “So that’s a yes, then?”

Phil smiled so brightly Clint could have melted under the light of it. “Yes, Barton, that’s a yes,” he said. “It’s always yes.”


	7. SHIELD Terms of Employment, Section F

  


STRATEGIC HOMELAND INTERVENTION ENFORCEMENT LOGISTICS DIVISION  
TERMS OF EMPLOYMENT, SECTION F 

[The following dates are handwritten in the left margin: 8-2-97, 9-7-97, 2-2-01, 1-8-03, 1-3-05, 1-1-06, 1-9-07, 8-1-07, 11-21-07, 6-30-08, 1-4-10, 1-12-11]  
 **F.  
Regarding circumstances in which an employee of S.H.I.E.L.D. is killed, permanently incapacitated, or otherwise rendered incapable of giving informed legal consent and is officially declared to be thus incapable by no less than two medical professionals at or above clearance level three, the following guidelines are to be applied.**

**i.** All employees of S.H.I.E.L.D. are required to file form [highlighted] P115-54Z to serve as final instruction in the event of death or incapacitation. Items enumerated in P115-54Z will be carried out by appropriate S.H.I.E.L.D. staff insofar as resources and material restrictions allow, provided no item requires a violation of S.H.I.E.L.D. security protocols as described in S.H.I.E.L.D. TERMS OF EMPLOYMENT Section C , Subsection iv (see: p.247 of this document), and Section M, Subsections iii and x (see: p.1031 of this document). 

**ii.** All employees of S.H.I.E.L.D. are required to update form P115-54Z every five (5) years or as needed. Active field agents with clearance level four or higher are encouraged to update form P115-54Z on an annual basis, but are not required to do so.

**iii.** In the event that form P115-54Z is not sufficiently current or that items enumerated therein are unable to be fulfilled, necessary legal decisions and property distribution will be made by the supervising officer assigned to the deceased/incapacitated employee or by another appropriate superior unless said legal decisions and property distribution is otherwise delegated according to the terms of Subsection iv of this section (see: below).

**iv.** Legal responsibilities and property distribution not otherwise encompassed by form P115-54Z and which fall outside the coverage of the S.H.I.E.L.D. personal calamity parameters as outlined in S.H.I.E.L.D. TERMS OF EMPLOYMENT Section B, Subsections i-xxxv (see: p.99-147 of this document), or as covered by an external insurance provider are to be delegated according to the following guidelines:

**\---(1)** If the deceased/incapacitated employee is not survived by any individual(s) with a basis for legal claim, all legal and material responsibilities will be assumed by the supervising officer assigned to said employee or by another appropriate superior.

**\---(2)** If the deceased/incapacitated employee is survived by one or more biological and/or adopted family members who are (a) recognized as deserving of legal rights by the state of residence and/or S.H.I.E.L.D. records and who are (b) of legal age and/or deemed to be capable of giving informed legal consent by the state of residence and/or S.H.I.E.L.D. official determination, all legal and material responsibilities will be assumed by said offspring and/or dependants, provided such delegation does not violate S.H.I.E.L.D. security protocols as described in S.H.I.E.L.D. TERMS OF EMPLOYMENT Section C, Subsection iv (see: p.247 of this document), and Section M, Subsections iii and x (see: p.1031 of this document).

**\---(3)** If the deceased/incapacitated agent is survived by any biological or adopted family members who are not recognized as deserving of legal rights by the state of residence and/or S.H.I.E.L.D. records or who are not of legal age and/or deemed to be capable of giving informed legal consent by the state of residence and/or S.H.I.E.L.D. official determination, form P115-02T may be filed on behalf of said family member(s) requesting that special consideration be afforded. In cases where form P115-02T is filed, refer to S.H.I.E.L.D. TERMS OF EMPLOYMENT Section L, Subsection ii (see: p.742 of this document). This may also be applied for individual(s) with whom the deceased/incapacitated employee has been in a committed romantic and/or sexual relationship which has been documented according to S.H.I.E.L.D. protocols as described in S.H.I.E.L.D. TERMS OF EMPLOYMENT Section D, Subsection ix (see: p.418 of this document) but which does not meet the terms of clauses (4) or (5) of this subsection.

**\---(4)** If the deceased/incapacitated employee is survived by one or more individuals with whom the deceased/incapacitated employee has been in a committed romantic and/or sexual relationship, and the individual(s) is recognized as deserving of legal rights by the state of residence and/or S.H.I.E.L.D. records, all legal and material responsibilities will be assumed by said individual(s), provided such delegation does not violate S.H.I.E.L.D. security protocols as described in S.H.I.E.L.D. TERMS OF EMPLOYMENT Section C , Subsection iv (see: p.247 of this document), and Section M, Subsections iii and x (see: p.1031 of this document).

[The following file designations are handwritten in the left margin: MR15899, MR23070, MR12672, P178-44R, P76-46G]  
[highlighted] **\---(5)** If the deceased/incapacitated employee is survived by one or more employees of S.H.I.E.L.D. with whom the deceased/incapacitated employee has been in a committed romantic and/or sexual relationship which has been [circled] documented according to S.H.I.E.L.D. protocols as described in S.H.I.E.L.D. TERMS OF EMPLOYMENT Section D, Subsection ii (see: p.301 of this document) but which does not guarantee legal rights, the surviving employee(s) may file form [highlighted] P115-13Q to request that special consideration be afforded. In cases where form P115-13Q is filed, refer to S.H.I.E.L.D. TERMS OF EMPLOYMENT Section D, Subsection vi (see: p.392 of this document).  
[A post-it is attached with an arrow drawn to indicate the above section and a handwritten note: Clint - in case]

**v.** In the event that the deceased/incapacitated employee is survived by any family members or committed sexual and/or romantic partners of any description, it is the responsibility of that employee’s supervising officer or another appropriate superior to issue notice of death or incapacitation to the survivors in a timely and appropriate manner and may answer questions as to the circumstances surrounding the death or incapacitation at their own discretion, provided the disclosure of any or all of the aforementioned information does not violate S.H.I.E.L.D. security protocols as described in S.H.I.E.L.D. TERMS OF EMPLOYMENT Section C, Subsection iv (see: p.247 of this document), and Section M, Subsections iii and x (see: p.1031 of this document)and does not in any way interfere with or jeopardize the success and security of any ongoing operations. Whether any information represents a threat to an ongoing operation is left to the discretion of the notifying officer and/or to the commanding officer overseeing the operation in question.

**vi.** In the event that a determination which has declared an employee deceased/incapacitated is reversed or found to be inaccurate, the [document ends]


End file.
